This blog considers two recent papers on the dynamics of scientific research: one in Nature and one by the brilliant physicist, Michael Nielsen, and the brilliant founder of Stripe, Patrick Collison, who is a very unusual CEO. These findings are very important to the question: how can we make economies more productive and what is the relationship between basic science and productivity? The papers are also interesting for those interested in the general question of high performance teams.
These issues are also crucial to the debate about what on earth Britain focuses on now the 2016 referendum has destroyed the Insiders’ preferred national strategy of ‘influencing the EU project’.
For as long as I have watched British politics carefully (sporadically since about 1998) these issues about science, technology and productivity have been almost totally ignored in the Insider debate because the incentives + culture of Westminster programs this behaviour: people with power are not incentivised to optimise for ‘improve science research and productivity’. E.g Everything Vote Leave said about funding science research during the referendum (including cooperation with EU programs) was treated as somewhere between eccentric, irrelevant and pointless by Insiders.
This recent Nature paper gives evidence that a) small teams are more disruptive in science research and b) solo researchers/small teams are significantly underfunded.
‘One of the most universal trends in science and technology today is the growth of large teams in all areas, as solitary researchers and small teams diminish in prevalence . Increases in team size have been attributed to the specialization of scientific activities, improvements in communication technology, or the complexity of modern problems that require interdisciplinary solutions. This shift in team size raises the question of whether and how the character of the science and technology produced by large teams differs from that of small teams. Here we analyse more than 65 million papers, patents and software products that span the period 1954–2014, and demonstrate that across this period smaller teams have tended to disrupt science and technology with new ideas and opportunities, whereas larger teams have tended to develop existing ones. Work from larger teams builds on more recent and popular developments, and attention to their work comes immediately. By contrast, contributions by smaller teams search more deeply into the past, are viewed as disruptive to science and technology and succeed further into the future — if at all. Observed differences between small and large teams are magnified for higher impact work, with small teams known for disruptive work and large teams for developing work. Differences in topic and research design account for a small part of the relationship between team size and disruption; most of the effect occurs at the level of the individual, as people move between smaller and larger teams. These results demonstrate that both small and large teams are essential to a flourishing ecology of science and technology, and suggest that, to achieve this, science policies should aim to support a diversity of team sizes…
‘Although much has been demonstrated about the professional and career benefits of team size for team members, there is little evidence that supports the notion that larger teams are optimized for knowledge discovery and technological invention. Experimental and observational research on groups reveals that individuals in large groups… generate fewer ideas, recall less learned information, reject external perspectives more often and tend to neutralize each other’s viewpoints…
‘Small teams disrupt science and technology by exploring and amplifying promising ideas from older and less-popular work. Large teams develop recent successes, by solving acknowledged problems and refining common designs. Some of this difference results from the substance of science and technology that small versus large teams tackle, but the larger part appears to emerge as a consequence of team size itself. Certain types of research require the resources of large teams, but large teams demand an ongoing stream of funding and success to ‘pay the bills’, which makes them more sensitive to the loss of reputation and support that comes from failure. Our findings are consistent with field research on teams in other domains, which demonstrate that small groups with more to gain and less to lose are more likely to undertake new and untested opportunities that have the potential for high growth and failure…
‘In contrast to Nobel Prize papers, which have an average disruption among the top 2% of all contemporary papers, funded papers rank near the bottom 31%. This could result from a conservative review process, proposals designed to anticipate such a process or a planning effect whereby small teams lock themselves into large-team inertia by remaining accountable to a funded proposal. When we compare two major policy incentives for science (funding versus awards), we find that Nobel-prize-winning articles significantly oversample small disruptive teams, whereas those that acknowledge US National Science Foundation funding oversample large developmental teams. Regardless of the dominant driver, these results paint a unified portrait of underfunded solo investigators and small teams who disrupt science and technology by generating new directions on the basis of deeper and wider information search. These results suggest the need for government, industry and non-profit funders of science and technology to investigate the critical role that small teams appear to have in expanding the frontiers of knowledge, even as large teams rapidly develop them.’
‘are we getting a proportional increase in our scientific understanding [for increased investment]? Or are we investing vastly more merely to sustain (or even see a decline in) the rate of scientific progress?
They explored, inter alia, ‘how scientists think the quality of Nobel Prize–winning discoveries has changed over the decades.’
They conclude:
‘The picture this survey paints is bleak: Over the past century, we’ve vastly increased the time and money invested in science, but in scientists’ own judgement, we’re producing the most important breakthroughs at a near-constant rate. On a per-dollar or per-person basis, this suggests that science is becoming far less efficient.’
It’s also interesting that:
‘In fact, just three [physics] discoveries made since 1990 have been awarded Nobel Prizes. This is too few to get a good quality estimate for the 1990s, and so we didn’t survey those prizes. However, the paucity of prizes since 1990 is itself suggestive. The 1990s and 2000s have the dubious distinction of being the decades over which the Nobel Committee has most strongly preferred to skip, and instead award prizes for earlier work. Given that the 1980s and 1970s themselves don’t look so good, that’s bad news for physics.’
There is a similar story in chemistry.
Why has science got so much more expensive without commensurate gains in understanding?
‘A partial answer to this question is suggested by work done by the economists Benjamin Jones and Bruce Weinberg. They’ve studied how old scientists are when they make their great discoveries. They found that in the early days of the Nobel Prize, future Nobel scientists were 37 years old, on average, when they made their prizewinning discovery. But in recent times that has risen to an average of 47 years, an increase of about a quarter of a scientist’s working career.
‘Perhaps scientists today need to know far more to make important discoveries. As a result, they need to study longer, and so are older, before they can do their most important work. That is, great discoveries are simply getting harder to make. And if they’re harder to make, that suggests there will be fewer of them, or they will require much more effort.
‘In a similar vein, scientific collaborations now often involve far more people than they did a century ago. When Ernest Rutherford discovered the nucleus of the atom in 1911, he published it in a paper with just a single author: himself. By contrast, the two 2012 papers announcing the discovery of the Higgs particle had roughly a thousand authors each. On average, research teams nearly quadrupled in size over the 20th century, and that increase continues today. For many research questions, it requires far more skills, expensive equipment, and a large team to make progress today.
They suggest that ‘the optimistic view is that science is an endless frontier, and we will continue to discover and even create entirely new fields, with their own fundamental questions’. If science is slowing now, then perhaps it ‘is because science has remained too focused on established fields, where it’s becoming ever harder to make progress. We hope the future will see a more rapid proliferation of new fields, giving rise to major new questions. This is an opportunity for science to accelerate.’ They give the example of the birth of computer science after Gödel’s and Turing’s papers in the 1930s.
They also consider the arguments among economists concerning productivity slowdown. Tyler Cowen and others have argued that the breakthroughs in the 19th and early 20th centuries were more significant than recent discoveries: e.g the large-scale deployment of powerful general-purpose technologies such as electricity, the internal-combustion engine, radio, telephones, air travel, the assembly line, fertiliser and so on. Productivity growth in the 1950s was ‘roughly six times higher than today. That means we see about as much change over a decade today as we saw in 18 months in the 1950s.’ Yes the computer and internet have been fantastic but they haven’t, so far, contributed as much as all those powerful technologies like electricity.
They also argue ‘there has been little institutional response’ either among the scientific community or government.
‘Perhaps this lack of response is in part because some scientists see acknowledging diminishing returns as betraying scientists’ collective self-interest. Most scientists strongly favor more research funding. They like to portray science in a positive light, emphasizing benefits and minimizing negatives. While understandable, the evidence is that science has slowed enormously per dollar or hour spent. That evidence demands a large-scale institutional response. It should be a major subject in public policy, and at grant agencies and universities. Better understanding the cause of this phenomenon is important, and identifying ways to reverse it is one of the greatest opportunities to improve our future.’
‘There are eighteen times more people involved in transistor-related research today than in 1971. So if in 1971 it took 1000 scientists to increase transistor density 35% per year, today it takes 18,000 scientists to do the same task. So apparently the average transistor scientist is eighteen times less productive today than fifty years ago. That should be surprising and scary.’
Similar arguments seem to apply in many areas.
‘All of these lines of evidence lead me to the same conclusion: constant growth rates in response to exponentially increasing inputs is the null hypothesis. If it wasn’t, we should be expecting 50% year-on-year GDP growth, easily-discovered-immortality, and the like.’
SSC also argues that the explanation for this phenomenon is the ‘low hanging fruit argument’:
‘For example, element 117 was discovered by an international collaboration who got an unstable isotope of berkelium from the single accelerator in Tennessee capable of synthesizing it, shipped it to a nuclear reactor in Russia where it was attached to a titanium film, brought it to a particle accelerator in a different Russian city where it was bombarded with a custom-made exotic isotope of calcium, sent the resulting data to a global team of theorists, and eventually found a signature indicating that element 117 had existed for a few milliseconds. Meanwhile, the first modern element discovery, that of phosphorous in the 1670s, came from a guy looking at his own piss. We should not be surprised that discovering element 117 needed more people than discovering phosphorous…
‘I worry even this isn’t dismissive enough. My real objection is that constant progress in science in response to exponential increases in inputs ought to be our null hypothesis, and that it’s almost inconceivable that it could ever be otherwise.‘
How likely is it that this will change radically?
‘At the end of the conference, the moderator asked how many people thought that it was possible for a concerted effort by ourselves and our institutions to “fix” the “problem”… Almost the entire room raised their hands. Everyone there was smarter and more prestigious than I was (also richer, and in many cases way more attractive), but with all due respect I worry they are insane. This is kind of how I imagine their worldview looking:
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I don’t know what the answers are to the tricky questions explored above. I do know that the existing systems for funding science are bad and we already have great ideas about how to improve our chances of making dramatic breakthroughs, even if we cannot escape the general problem that a lot of low-hanging fruit in traditional subjects like high energy physics is gone.
I have repeated this theme ad nauseam on this blog:
1) We KNOW how effective the very unusual funding for computer science was in the 1960s/1970s — ARPA-PARC created the internet and personal computing — and there are other similar case studies but
2) almost no science is funded in this way and
3) there is practically no debate about this even among scientists, many of whom are wholly ignorant about this. As Alan Kay has observed, there is an amazing contrast between the huge amount of interest in the internet/PC revolution and the near-zero interest in what created the super-productive processes that sparked this revolution.
One of the reasons is the usual problem of bad incentives reinforcing a dysfunctional equilibrium: successful scientists have a lot of power and have a strong personal interest in preserving current funding systems that let them build empires. These empires include often bad treatment of young postdocs who are abused as cheap labour. This is connected to the point above about the average age of Nobel-winners growing. Much of the 1930s quantum revolution was done by people aged ~20-35 and so was the internet/PC revolution in the 1960s/1970s. The latter was deliberate: Licklider et al deliberately funded not short-term projects but creating whole new departments and institutions for young people. They funded a healthy ecosystem: people not projects was one of the core principles. People in their twenties now have very little power or money in the research ecosystem. Further, they have to operate in an appalling time-wasting-grant-writing bureaucracy that Heisenberg, Dirac et al did not face in the 1920s/30s. The politicians and officials don’t care so there is no force to push sensible experiments with new ideas. Almost all ‘reform’ from the central bureaucracy pushes in the direction of more power for the central bureaucracy, not fixing problems.
For example, for an amount of money that the Department for Education loses every week without ministers/officials even noticing it’s lost — I know from experience this is single figure millions — we could transform the funding of masters and PhDs in maths, physics, chemistry, biology, and computer science. There is so much good that could be done for trivial money that isn’t even wasted in the normal sense of ‘spent on rubbish gimmicks and procurement disasters’, it just disappears into the aether without anybody noticing.
The government spends about 250 billion pounds a year with extreme systematic incompetence. If we ‘just’ applied what we know about high performance project management and procurement we could take savings from this budget and put it into ARPA-PARC style high-risk-high-payoff visions including creating whole new fields. This would create powerful self-reinforcing dynamics that would give Britain real assets of far, far greater value than the chimerical ‘influence’ in Brussels meeting rooms where ‘economic and monetary union’ is the real focus.
A serious government or a serious new party (not TIG obviously which is business as usual with the usual suspects) would focus on these things. Under Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron and May these issues have been neglected for quarter of a century. The Conservative Party now has almost no intellectual connection to crucial debates about the ecosystem of science, productivity, universities, funding, startups and so on. I know from personal experience that even billionaire entrepreneurs whose donations are vital to the survival of CCHQ cannot get people like Hammond to listen to anything about all this — Hammond’s focus is obeying his orders from Goldman Sachs. Downing Street is much more interested in protecting corporate looting by large banks and companies and protecting rent-seekers than they are in productivity and entrepreneurs. Having an interest in this subject is seen as a sign of eccentricity to say the least while the ambitious people focus on ‘strategy’, speeches, interviews and all the other parts of their useless implicit ‘model for effective action’. The Tories are reduced to slogans about ‘freedom’, ‘deregulation’ and so on which provide no answers to our productivity problem and, ironically, lie between pointless and self-destructive for them politically but, crucially, play in the self-referential world of Parliament, ‘think tanks’, and pundit-world who debate ‘the next leader’ and which provides the real incentives that drive behaviour.
There is no force in British politics that prioritises science and productivity. Hopefully soon someone will say ‘there is such a party’…
Remove bureaucracy like the multi-stage procurement processes for buying a lightbulb. ‘Rather than invigilate every single decision, we should do spot checks retrospectively, as is done with tax returns.’
‘We should return to funding university departments more directly, allowing more rapid, situation-aware decision-making of the kind present in start-ups, and create a diversity of funding systems.’
There are many simple steps like guaranteed work visas for spouses that could make the UK a magnet for talented young scientists.
‘People, ideas, machines — in that order!’ Colonel Boyd
‘[R]ational systems exhibit universal drives towards self-protection, resource acquisition, replication and efficiency. Those drives will lead to anti-social and dangerous behaviour if not explicitly countered. The current computing infrastructure would be very vulnerable to unconstrained systems with these drives.’ Omohundro.
‘For progress there is no cure…’ von Neumann
This blog sketches a few recent developments connecting AI and issues around ‘systems management’ and government procurement.
The biggest problem for governments with new technologies is that the limiting factor on applying new technologies is not the technology but management and operational ideas which are extremely hard to change fast. This has been proved repeatedly: eg. the tank in the 1920s-30s or the development of ‘precision strike’ in the 1970s. These problems are directly relevant to the application of AI by militaries and intelligence services. The Pentagon’s recent crash program, Project Maven, discussed below, was an attempt to grapple with these issues.
‘The good news is that Project Maven has delivered a game-changing AI capability… The bad news is that Project Maven’s success is clear proof that existing AI technology is ready to revolutionize many national security missions… The project’s success was enabled by its organizational structure.‘
This blog sketches some connections between:
Project Maven.
The example of ‘precision strike’ in the 1970s, Marshal Ogarkov and Andy Marshall, implications for now — ‘anti-access / area denial’ (A2/AD), ‘Air-Sea Battle’ etc.
Development of ‘precision strike’ to lethal autonomous cheap drone swarms hunting humans cowering underground.
Adding AI to already broken nuclear systems and doctrines, hacking the NSA etc — mix coke, Milla Jovovich and some alpha engineers and you get…?
A few thoughts on ‘systems management’ and procurement, lessons from the Manhattan Project etc.
The Chinese attitude to ‘systems management’ and Qian Xuesen, combined with AI, mass surveillance, ‘social credit’ etc.
A few recent miscellaneous episodes such as an interesting DARPA demo on ‘self-aware’ robots.
Charts on Moore’s Law: what scale would a ‘Manhattan Project for AGI’ be?
AGI safety — the alignment problem, the dangers of science as a ‘blind search algorithm’, closed vs open security architectures etc.
A theme of this blog since before the referendum campaign has been that thinking about organisational structure/dynamics can bring what Warren Buffett calls ‘lollapalooza’ results. What seems to be very esoteric and disconnected from ‘practical politics’ (studying things like the management of the Manhattan Project and Apollo) turns out to be extraordinarily practical (gives you models for creating super-productive processes).
Part of the reason lollapalooza results are possible is that almost nobody near the apex of power believes the paragraph above is true and they actively fight to stop people learning from extreme successes so there is gold lying on the ground waiting to be picked up for trivial costs. Nudging reality down an alternative branch of history in summer 2016 only cost ~£106 so the ‘return on investment’ if you think about altered GDP, technology, hundreds of millions of lives over decades and so on was truly lollapalooza. Politics is not like the stock market where you need to be an extreme outlier like Buffett/Munger to find such inefficiencies and results consistently. The stock market is an exploitable market where being right means you get rich and you help the overall system error-correct which makes it harder to be right (the mechanism pushes prices close to random, they’re not quite random but few can exploit the non-randomness). Politics/government is not like this. Billionaires who want to influence politics could get better ‘returns on investment’ than from early stage Amazon.
This blog is not directly about Brexit at all but if you are thinking — how could we escape this nightmare and turn government institutions from hopeless to high performance and what should we focus on to replace the vision of ‘influencing the EU’ that has been blown up by Brexit? — it will be of interest. Lessons that have been lying around for over half a century could have pushed the Brexit negotiations in a completely different direction and still could do but require an extremely different ‘model of effective action’ to dominant models in Westminster.
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Project Maven: new organisational approaches for rapid deployment of AI to war / hybrid-war
The quotes below are from a piece in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists about a recent AI project by the Pentagon. The most interesting aspect is not the technical details but the management approach and implications for Pentagon-style bureaucraties.
‘Project Maven is a crash Defense Department program that was designed to deliver AI technologies … to an active combat theater within six months from when the project received funding… Technologies developed through Project Maven have already been successfully deployed in the fight against ISIS. Despite their rapid development and deployment, these technologies are getting strong praise from their military intelligence users. For the US national security community, Project Maven’s frankly incredible success foreshadows enormous opportunities ahead — as well as enormous organizational, ethical, and strategic challenges.
‘In late April, Robert Work — then the deputy secretary of the Defense Department — wrote a memo establishing the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, also known as Project Maven. The team had only six members to start with, but its small size belied the significance of its charter… Project Maven is the first time the Defense Department has sought to deploy deep learning and neural networks, at the level of state-of-the-art commercial AI, in department operations in a combat theater…
‘Every day, US spy planes and satellites collect more raw data than the Defense Department could analyze even if its whole workforce spent their entire lives on it. As its AI beachhead, the department chose Project Maven, which focuses on analysis of full-motion video data from tactical aerial drone platforms… These drone platforms and their full-motion video sensors play a major role in the conflict against ISIS across the globe. The tactical and medium-altitude video sensors of the Scan Eagle, MQ-1C, and MQ-9 produce imagery that more or less resembles what you see on Google Earth. A single drone with these sensors produces many terabytes of data every day. Before AI was incorporated into analysis of this data, it took a team of analysts working 24 hours a day to exploit only a fraction of one drone’s sensor data.
‘The Defense Department spent tens of billions of dollars developing and fielding these sensors and platforms, and the capabilities they offer are remarkable. Whenever a roadside bomb detonates in Iraq, the analysts can simply rewind the video feed to watch who planted it there, when they planted it, where they came from, and where they went. Unfortunately, most of the imagery analysis involves tedious work—people look at screens to count cars, individuals, or activities, and then type their counts into a PowerPoint presentation or Excel spreadsheet. Worse, most of the sensor data just disappears — it’s never looked at — even though the department has been hiring analysts as fast as it can for years… Plenty of higher-value analysis work will be available for these service members and contractors once low-level counting activity is fully automated.
‘The six founding members of Project Maven, though they were assigned to run an AI project, were not experts in AI or even computer science. Rather, their first task was building partnerships, both with AI experts in industry and academia and with the Defense Department’s communities of drone sensor analysts… AI experts and organizations who are interested in helping the US national security mission often find that the department’s contracting procedures are so slow, costly, and painful that they just don’t want to bother. Project Maven’s team — with the help of Defense Information Unit Experimental, an organization set up to accelerate the department’s adoption of commercial technologies — managed to attract the support of some of the top talent in the AI field (the vast majority of which lies outside the traditional defense contracting base). Figuring out how to effectively engage the tech sector on a project basis is itself a remarkable achievement…
‘Before Maven, nobody in the department had a clue how to properly buy, field, and implement AI. A traditional defense acquisition process lasts multiple years, with separate organizations defining the functions that acquisitions must perform, or handling technology development, production, or operational deployment. Each of these organizations must complete its activities before results are handed off to the next organization. When it comes to digital technologies, this approach often results in systems that perform poorly and are obsolete even before they are fielded.
‘Project Maven has taken a different approach, one modeled after project management techniques in the commercial tech sector: Product prototypes and underlying infrastructure are developed iteratively, and tested by the user community on an ongoing basis. Developers can tailor their solutions to end-user needs, and end users can prepare their organizations to make rapid and effective use of AI capabilities. Key activities in AI system development — labeling data, developing AI-computational infrastructure, developing and integrating neural net algorithms, and receiving user feedback — are all run iteratively and in parallel…
‘In Maven’s case, humans had to individually label more than 150,000 images in order to establish the first training data sets; the group hopes to have 1 million images in the training data set by the end of January. Such large training data sets are needed for ensuring robust performance across the huge diversity of possible operating conditions, including different altitudes, density of tracked objects, image resolution, view angles, and so on. Throughout the Defense Department, every AI successor to Project Maven will need a strategy for acquiring and labeling a large training data set…
‘From their users, Maven’s developers found out quickly when they were headed down the wrong track — and could correct course. Only this approach could have provided a high-quality, field-ready capability in the six months between the start of the project’s funding and the operational use of its output. In early December, just over six months from the start of the project, Maven’s first algorithms were fielded to defense intelligence analysts to support real drone missions in the fight against ISIS.
‘The good news is that Project Maven has delivered a game-changing AI capability… The bad news is that Project Maven’s success is clear proof that existing AI technology is ready to revolutionize many national security missions…
‘The project’s success was enabled by its organizational structure: a small, operationally focused, cross-functional team that was empowered to develop external partnerships, leverage existing infrastructure and platforms, and engage with user communities iteratively during development. AI needs to be woven throughout the fabric of the Defense Department, and many existing department institutions will have to adopt project management structures similar to Maven’s if they are to run effective AI acquisition programs. Moreover, the department must develop concepts of operations to effectively use AI capabilities—and train its military officers and warfighters in effective use of these capabilities…
‘Already the satellite imagery analysis community is working on its own version of Project Maven. Next up will be migrating drone imagery analysis beyond the campaign to defeat ISIS and into other segments of the Defense Department that use drone imagery platforms. After that, Project Maven copycats will likely be established for other types of sensor platforms and intelligence data, including analysis of radar, signals intelligence, and even digital document analysis… In October 2016, Michael Rogers (head of both the agency and US Cyber Command) said “Artificial Intelligence and machine learning … [are] foundational to the future of cybersecurity. … It is not the if, it’s only the when to me.”
‘The US national security community is right to pursue greater utilization of AI capabilities. The global security landscape — in which both Russia and China are racing to adapt AI for espionage and warfare — essentially demands this. Both Robert Work and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt have said that leadership in AI technology is critical to the future of economic and military power and that continued US leadership is far from guaranteed. Still, the Defense Department must explore this new technological landscape with a clear understanding of the risks involved…
‘The stakes are relatively low when AI is merely counting the number of cars filmed by a drone camera, but drone surveillance data can also be used to determine whether an individual is directly engaging in hostilities and is thereby potentially subject to direct attack. As AI systems become more capable and are deployed across more applications, they will engender ever more difficult ethical and legal dilemmas.
‘US military and intelligence agencies will have to develop effective technological and organizational safeguards to ensure that Washington’s military use of AI is consistent with national values. They will have to do so in a way that retains the trust of elected officials, the American people, and Washington’s allies. The arms-race aspect of artificial intelligence certainly doesn’t make this task any easier…
‘The Defense Department must develop and field AI systems that are reliably safe when the stakes are life and death — and when adversaries are constantly seeking to find or create vulnerabilities in these systems.
‘Moreover, the department must develop a national security strategy that focuses on establishing US advantages even though, in the current global security environment, the ability to implement advanced AI algorithms diffuses quickly. When the department and its contractors developed stealth and precision-guided weapons technology in the 1970s, they laid the foundation for a monopoly, nearly four decades long, on technologies that essentially guaranteed victory in any non-nuclear war. By contrast, today’s best AI tech comes from commercial and academic communities that make much of their research freely available online. In any event, these communities are far removed from the Defense Department’s traditional technology circles. For now at least, the best AI research is still emerging from the United States and allied countries, butChina’s national AI strategy, released in July, poses a credible challenge to US technology leadership.’
Project Maven shows recurring lessons from history. Speed and adaptability are crucial to success in conflict and can be helped by new technologies. So is the capacity for new operational ideas about using new technologies. These ideas depend on unusual people. Bureaucracies naturally slow things down (for some good but mostly bad reasons), crush new ideas, and exclude unusual people in order to defend established interests. The limiting factor for the Pentagon in deploying advanced technology to conflict in a useful time period was not new technical ideas — overcoming its own bureaucracy was harder than overcoming enemy action. This is absolutely normal in conflict (e.g it was true of the 2016 referendum where dealing with internal problems was at least an order of magnitude harder and more costly than dealing with Cameron).
As Colonel Boyd used to shout to military audiences, ‘People, ideas, machines — in that order!’
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DARPA, ‘precision strike’, the ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ and bureaucracies
The Project Maven experience is similar to the famous example of the tank. Everybody could see tanks were possible from the end of World War I but over 20 years Britain and France were hampered by their own bureaucracies in thinking about the operational implications and how to use them most effectively. Some in Britain and France did point out the possibilities but the possibilities were not absorbed into official planning. Powerful bureaucratic interests reinforced the normal sort of blindness to new possibilities. Innovative thinking flourished, relatively, in Germany where people like Guderian and von Manstein could see the possibilities for a very big increase in speed turning into a huge nonlinear advantage — possibilities applied to the ‘von Manstein plan’ that shocked the world in 1940. This was partly because the destruction of German forces after 1918 meant everything had to be built from scratch and this connects to another lesson about successful innovation: in the military, as in business, it is more likely if a new entity is given the job, as with the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons. The consequences were devastating for the world in 1940 but, lucky for us, the nature of the Nazi regime meant that it made very similar errors itself, e.g regarding the importance of air power in general and long range bombers in particular. (This history is obviously very complex but this crude summary is roughly right about the main point)
There was a similar story with the technological developments mainly sparked by DARPA in the 1970s including stealth (developed in a classified program by the legendary ‘Skunk Works’, tested at ‘Area 51’), global positioning system (GPS), ‘precision strike’ long-range conventional weapons, drones, advanced wide-area sensors, computerised command and control (C2), and new intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance capabilities (ISR). The hope was that together these capabilities could automate the location and destruction of long-range targets and greatly improve simultaneously the precision, destructiveness, and speed of operations.
The approach became known in America as ‘deep-strike architectures’ (DSA) and in the Soviet Union as ‘reconnaissance-strike complexes’ (RUK).The Soviet Marshal Ogarkov realised that these developments, based on America’s superior ability to develop micro-electronics and computers, constituted what he called a ‘Military-Technical Revolution’ (MTR) and was an existential threat to the Soviet Union. He wrote about them from the late 1970s. (The KGB successfully stole much of the technology but the Soviet system still could not compete.) His writings were analysed in America particularly by Andy Marshall at the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA) and others. ONA’s analyses of what they started calling the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) in turn affected Pentagon decisions. In 1991 the Gulf War demonstrated some of these technologies just as the Soviet Union was imploding. In 1992 the ONA wrote a very influential report (The Military-Technical Revolution) which, unusually, they made public (almost all ONA documents remain classified).
The ~1978 Assault Breaker concept
Soviet depiction of Assault Breaker (Sergeyev, ‘Reconnaissance-Strike Complexes,’ Red Star, 1985)
In many ways Marshal Ogarkov thought more deeply about how to develop the Pentagon’s own technologies than the Pentagon did, hampered by the normal problems that the operationalising of new ideas threatened established bureaucratic interests, including the Pentagon’s procurement system. These problems have continued. It is hard to overstate the scale of waste and corruption in the Pentagon’s horrific procurement system (see below).
China has studied this episode intensely. It has integrated lessons into their ‘anti-access / area denial’ (A2/AD) efforts to limit American power projection in East Asia. America’s response to A2/AD is the ‘Air-Sea Battle’ concept. As Marshal Ogarkov predicted in the 1970s the ‘revolution’ has evolved into opposing ‘reconnaissance-strike complexes’ facing each other with each side striving to deploy near-nuclear force using extremely precise conventional weapons from far away, all increasingly complicated by possibilities for cyberwar to destroy the infrastructure on which all this depends and information operations to alter the enemy population’s perception (very Sun Tzu!).
Graphic: Operational risks of conventional US approach vs A2/AD (CSBA, 2016)
The penetration of the CIA by the KGB, the failure of the CIA to provide good predictions, the general American failure to understand the Soviet economy, doctrine and so on despite many billions spent over decades, the attempts by the Office of Net Assessment to correct institutional failings, the bureaucratic rivalries and so on — all this is a fascinating subject and one can see why China studies it so closely.
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From experimental drones in the 1970s to drone swarms deployed via iPhone
The next step for reconnaissance-strike is the application of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence which could bring further order(s) of magnitude performance improvements, cost reductions, and increases in tempo.This is central to the US-China military contest. It will also affect everyone else as much of the technology becomes available to Third World states and small terrorist groups.
I wrote in 2004 about the farce of the UK aircraft carrier procurement story (and many others have warned similarly). Regardless of elections, the farce has continued to squander billions of pounds, enriching some of the worst corporate looters and corrupting public life via the revolving door of officials/lobbyists. Scrutiny by our MPs has been contemptible. They have built platforms that already cannot be sent to a serious war against a serious enemy. A teenager will be able to deploy a drone from their smartphone to sink one of these multi-billion dollar platforms. Such a teenager could already take out the stage of a Downing Street photo op with a little imagination and initiative, as I wrote about years ago
The drone industry is no longer dependent on its DARPA roots and is no longer tied to the economics of the Pentagon’s research budgets and procurement timetables. It is driven by the economics of the extremely rapidly developing smartphone market including Moore’s Law, plummeting costs for sensors and so on. Further, there are great advantages of autonomy including avoiding jamming counter-measures. Kalashnikov has just unveiled its drone version of the AK-47: a cheap anonymous suicide drone that flies to the target and blows itself up — it’s so cheap you don’t care. So you have a combination of exponentially increasing capabilities, exponentially falling costs, greater reliability, greater lethality, greater autonomy, and anonymity (if you’re careful and buy them through cut-outs etc). Then with a bit of added sophistication you add AI face recognition etc. Then you add an increasing capacity to organise many of these units at scale in a swarm, all running off your iPhone — and consider how effective swarming tactics were for people like Alexander the Great.
This is why one of the world’s leading AI researchers, Stuart Russell (professor of computer science at Berkeley) has made this warning:
‘The capabilities of autonomous weapons will be limited more by the laws of physics — for example, by constraints on range, speed and payload — than by any deficiencies in the AI systems that control them. For instance, as flying robots become smaller, their manoeuvrability increases and their ability to be targeted decreases… Despite the limits imposed by physics, one can expect platforms deployed in the millions, the agility and lethality of which will leave humans utterly defenceless…
‘A very, very small quadcopter, one inch in diameter can carry a one- or two-gram shaped charge. You can order them from a drone manufacturer in China. You can program the code to say: “Here are thousands of photographs of the kinds of things I want to target.” A one-gram shaped charge can punch a hole in nine millimeters of steel, so presumably you can also punch a hole in someone’s head. You can fit about three million of those in a semi-tractor-trailer. You can drive up I-95 with three trucks and have 10 million weapons attacking New York City. They don’t have to be very effective, only 5 or 10% of them have to find the target.
‘There will be manufacturers producing millions of these weapons that people will be able to buy just like you can buy guns now, except millions of guns don’t matter unless you have a million soldiers. You need only three guys to write the program and launch them. So you can just imagine that in many parts of the world humans will be hunted. They will be cowering underground in shelters and devising techniques so that they don’t get detected. This is the ever-present cloud of lethal autonomous weapons… There are really no technological breakthroughs that are required. Every one of the component technologies is available in some form commercially… It’s really a matter of just how much resources are invested in it.’
There is some talk in London of ‘what if there is an AI arms race’ but there is already an AI/automation arms race between companies and between countries — it’s just that Europe is barely relevant to the cutting edge of it. Europe wants to be a world player but it has totally failed to generate anything approaching what is happening in coastal America and China. Brussels spends its time on posturing, publishing documents about ‘AI and trust’, whining, spreading fake news about fake news (while ignoring experts like Duncan Watts), trying to damage Silicon Valley companies rather than considering how to nourish European entities with real capabilities, and imposing bad regulation like GDPR (that ironically was intended to harm Google/Facebook but actually helped them in some ways because Brussels doesn’t understand them).
Britain had a valuable asset, Deep Mind, and let Google buy it for trivial money without the powers-that-be in Whitehall understanding its significance — it is relevant but it is not under British control. Britain has other valuable assets — for example, it is a potential strategic asset to have the AI centre, financial centre, and political centre all in London, IF politicians cared and wanted to nourish AI research and companies. Very obviously, right now we have a MP/official class that is unfit to do this even if they had the vaguest idea what to do, which almost none do (there is a flash of hope on genomics/AI).
Unlike during the Cold War when the Soviet Union could not compete in critical industries such as semi-conductors and consumer electronics, China can compete, is competing, and in some areas is already ahead.
The automation arms race is already hitting all sorts of low skilled jobs from baristas to factory cleaning, some of which will be largely eliminated much more quickly than economists and politicians expect. Many agricultural jobs are being rapidly eliminated as are jobs in fields like mining and drilling. Look at a modern mine and you will see driverless trucks on the ground and drones overhead. The implications for millions who make a living from driving is now well known. (This also has obvious implications for the wisdom of allowing millions of un-skilled immigrants and one of the oddities of Silicon Valley is that people there simultaneously argue a) politicians are clueless about the impact of automation on unskilled people and b) politicians should allow millions more unskilled immigrants into the country — an example of how technical people are not always as rational about politics as they think they are.)
This automation arms race will affect different countries at different speeds depending on their exposure to fields that are ripe for disruption sooner or later. If countries cannot tax those companies that lead in AI, they will have narrower options. They may even be forced into a sort of colony status. Those who think this is an exaggeration should look at China’s recent deals in Africa where countries are handing over vast amounts of data to China on extremely unfavourable terms. Huge server farms in China are processing facial recognition data on millions of Africans who have no idea their personal data has been handed over. The western media focuses on Facebook with almost no coverage of these issues.
In the extreme case, a significant lead in AI for country X could lead to a self-reinforcing cycle in which it increasingly dominates economically, scientifically, and militarily and perhaps cannot be caught as Ian Hogarth has argued and to which Putin recently alluded.
China’s investment in AI — more data = better product = more users = more revenue = better talent + more data in a beautiful flywheel…
China has about x3 number of internet users than America but the gap in internet and mobile usage is much larger. ‘In China, people use their mobile phones to pay for goods 50 times more often than Americans. Food delivery volume in China is 10 times more than that of the United States. And shared bicycle usage is 300 times that of the US. This proliferation of data — with more people generating far more information than any other country – is the fuel for improving China’s AI’ (report).
China’s AI policy priority is clear. The ‘Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan‘ announced in July 2017 states that China should catch America by 2020 and be the global leader by 2030. Xi Jinping emphasises this repeatedly.
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Some implications for entangling AI with WMD — take a Milla Jovovich lookalike then add some alpha engineers…
It is important to consider nuclear safety when thinking about AI safety.
The missile silos for US nuclear weapons have repeatedly been shown to be terrifyingly insecure. Sometimes incidents are just bog standard unchecked incompetence: e.g nuclear weapons are accidentally loaded onto a plane which is then left unattended on an insecure airfield. Coke, great unconventional hookers and a bit of imagination get you into nuclear facilities, just as they get you into pretty much anywhere.
This matches research just published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists on the most secure (Level 3/enhanced and Level 4) bio-labs. It is now clear that laboratories conducting research on viruses that could cause a global pandemic are extremely dangerous. I am not aware of any mainstream media in Britain reporting this (story here).
Further, the systems for coping with nuclear crises have failed repeatedly. They are extremely vulnerable to false alarms, malicious attacks or even freaks like, famously, a bear (yes, a bear) triggering false alarms. We have repeatedly escaped accidental nuclear war because of flukes such as odd individuals not passing on ‘launch’ warnings or simply refusing to act. The US National Security Adviser has sat at the end of his bed looking at his sleeping wife ‘knowing’ she won’t wake up while pondering his advice to the President on a counterattack that will destroy half the world, only to be told minutes later the launch warning was the product of a catastrophic error. These problems have not been dealt with. We don’t know how bad this problem is: many details are classified and many incidents are totally unreported.
Further, the end of the Cold War gave many politicians and policy people in the West the completely false idea that established ideas about deterrence had been vindicated but they have not been vindicated (cf. Payne’s Fallacies of Cold War deterrence and The Great American Gamble). Senior decision-makers are confident that their very dangerous ideas are ‘rational’.
US and Russian nukes remain on ‘launch on warning’ — i.e a hair trigger — so the vulnerabilities could recur any time. Threats to use them are explicitly contemplated over crises such as Taiwan and Kashmir. Nuclear weapons have proliferated and are very likely to proliferate further. There are now thousands of people, including North Korean and Pakistani scientists, who understand the technology. And there is a large network of scientists involved in the classified Soviet bio-weapon programme that was largely unknown to western intelligence services before the end of the Cold War and has dispersed across the world.
Yes, you’re right to ask ‘why don’t I read about this stuff in the mainstream media?’. There is very little media coverage of reports on things like nuclear safety and pretty much nobody with real power pays any attention to all this. If those at the apex of power don’t take nuclear safety seriously, why would you think they are on top of anything? Markets and science have done wondrous things but they cannot by themselves fix such crazy incentive problems with government institutions.
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Government procurement — ‘the horror, the horror’
The problem of ‘rational procurement’ is incredibly hard to solve and even during existential conflicts problems with incentives recur. If state agencies, out of fear of what opponents might be doing, create organisations that escape most normal bureaucratic constraints, then AI will escalate in importance to the military and intelligence services even more rapidly than it already is. It is possible that China will build organisations to deploy AI to war/pseudo-war/hybrid-war faster and better than America.
In January 2017 I wrote about systems engineering and systems management — an approach for delivering extremely complex and technically challenging projects. (It was already clear the Brexit negotiations were botched, that Heywood, Hammond et al had effectively destroyed any sort of serious negotiating position, and I suggested Westminster/Whitehall had to learn from successful management of complex projects to avert what would otherwise be a debacle.) These ideas were born with the Manhattan Project to build the first nuclear bomb, the ICBMs project in the 1950s, and the Apollo program in the 1960s which put man on the moon. These projects combined a) some of the most astonishing intellects the world has seen of which a subset were also brilliant at navigating government (e.g von Neumann) and b) phenomenally successful practical managers: e.g General Groves on Manhattan Project, Bernard Schriever on ICBMs and George Mueller on Apollo.
The story we are told about the Manhattan Project focuses almost exclusively on the extraordinary collection of physicists and mathematicians at Los Alamos but they were a relatively small part of the whole story which involved an engineer building an unprecedented operation at multiple sites across America in secret and with extraordinary speed while many doubted the project was possible — then coordinating multiple projects, integrating distributed expertise and delivering a functioning bomb.
If you read Groves’ fascinating book, Now It Can Be Told, and read a recent biography of him, in many important ways you will acquire what is effectively cutting-edge knowledge today about making huge endeavours work — ‘cutting-edge’ because almost nobody has learned from this (see below). If you are one of the many MPs aspiring to be not just Prime Minister but a Prime Minister who gets important things done, there are very few books that would repay careful study as much as Groves’. If you do then you could avoid joining the list of Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron and May who bungle around for a few years before being spat out to write very similar accounts about how they struggled to ‘find the levers of power’, couldn’t get officials to do what they want, and never understood how to get things done.
Systems management is generally relevant to the question: how best to manage very big complex projects? It was relevant to the referendum (Victoria Woodcock was Vote Leave’s George Mueller). It is relevant to the Brexit negotiations and the appalling management process between May/Hammond/Heywood/Robbins et al, which has been a case study in how not to manage a complex project (Parliament also deserves much blame for never scrutinising this process). It is relevant to China’s internal development and the US-China geopolitical struggle. It is relevant to questions like ‘how to avoid nuclear war’ and ‘how would you build a Manhattan Project for safe AGI?’. It is relevant to how you could develop a high performance team in Downing Street that could end the current farce. The same issues and lessons crop up in every account of a Presidency and the role of the Chief of Staff. If you want to change Whitehall from 1) ‘failure is normal’ to 2) ‘align incentives with predictive accuracy, operational excellence and high performance’, then systems management provides an extremely valuable anti-checklist for Whitehall.
Given vital principles were established more than half a century ago that were proved to do things much faster and more effectively than usual, it would be natural to assume that these lessons became integrated in training and practice both in the worlds of management and politics/government. This did not happen. In fact, these lessons have been ‘unlearned’.
General Groves was pushed out of the Pentagon (‘too difficult’). The ICBM project, conducted in extreme panic post-Sputnik, had to re-create an organisation outside the Pentagon and re-learn Groves’ lessons a decade later. NASA was a mess until Mueller took over and imported the lessons from Manhattan and ICBMs. After Apollo’s success in 1969, Mueller left and NASA reverted to being a ‘normal’ organisation and forgot his successful approach. (The plans Mueller left for developing a manned lunar base, space commercialisation, and man on Mars by the end of the 1980s were also tragically abandoned.)
While Mueller was putting man on the moon, MacNamara’s ‘Whizz Kids’ in the Pentagon, who took America into the Vietnam War, were dismantling the successful approach to systems management claiming that it was ‘wasteful’ and they could do it ‘more efficiently’. Their approach was a disaster and not just regarding Vietnam. The combination of certain definitions of ‘efficiency’ and new legal processes ensured that procurement was routinely over-budget, over-schedule, over-promising, and generated more and more scandals. Regardless of failure the MacNamara approach metastasised across the Pentagon. Incentives are so disastrously misaligned that almost every attempt at reform makes these problems worse and lawyers and lobbyists get richer. Of course, if lawmakers knew how the Manhattan Project and Apollo were done — the lack of ‘legal process’, things happening with a mere handshake instead of years of reviews enriching lawyers! — they would be stunned.
Successes since the 1960s have often been freaks (e.g the F-16, Boyd’s brainchild) or ‘black’ projects (e.g stealth) and often conducted in SkunkWorks-style operations outside normal laws. It is striking that US classified special forces, JSOC (equivalent to SAS/SBS etc), routinely use a special process to procure technologies outside the normal law to avoid the delays. This connects to George Mueller saying late in life that Apollo would be impossible with the current legal/procurement system and it could only be done as a ‘black’ program.
The lessons of success have been so widely ‘unlearned’ throughout the government system that when Obama tried to roll out ObamaCare, it blew up. When they investigated, the answer was: we didn’t use systems management so the parts didn’t connect and we never tested this properly. Remember: Obama had the support of the vast majority of Silicon Valley expertise but this did not avert disaster. All anyone had to do was read Groves’ book and call Sam Altman or Patrick Collison and they could have provided the expertise to do it properly but none of Obama’s staff or responsible officials did.
The UK is the same. MPs constantly repeat the absurd SW1 mantra that ‘there’s no money’ while handing out a quarter of a TRILLION pounds every year on procurement and contracting. I engaged with this many times in the Department for Education 2010-14. The Whitehall procurement system is embedded in the dominant framework of EU law (the EU law is bad but UK officials have made it worse). It is complex, slow and wasteful. It hugely favours large established companies with powerful political connections — true corporate looters. The likes of Carillion and lawyers love it because they gain from the complexity, delays, and waste. It is horrific for SMEs to navigate and few can afford even to try to participate. The officials in charge of multi-billion processes are mostly mediocre, often appalling. In the MoD corruption adds to the problems.
Because of mangled incentives and reinforcing culture, the senior civil service does not care about this and does not try to improve. Total failure is totally irrelevant to the senior civil service and is absolutely no reason to change behaviour even if it means thousands of people killed and many billions wasted. Occasionally incidents like Carillion blow up and the same stories are written and the same quotes given — ‘unbelievable’, ‘scandal’, ‘incompetence’, ‘heads will roll’. Nothing changes. The closed and dysfunctional Whitehall system fights to stay closed and dysfunctional. The media caravan soon rolls on. ‘Reform’ in response to botches and scandals almost inevitably makes things even slower and more expensive — even more focus on process rather than outcomes, with the real focus being ‘we can claim to have acted properly because of our Potemkin process’. Nobody is incentivised to care about high performance and error-correction. The MPs ignore it all. Select Committees issue press releases about ‘incompetence’ but never expose the likes of Heywood to persistent investigation to figure out what has really happened and why. Nobody cares.
This culture has been encouraged by the most senior leaders. The recent Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood assured us all that the civil service could easily cope with Brexit and the civil service would handle Brexit fine and ‘definitely on digital, project management we’ve got nothing to learn from the private sector’. His predecessor, O’Donnell, made similar asinine comments.The fact that Heywood could make such a laughable claim after years of presiding over expensive debacle after expensive debacle and be universally praised by Insiders tells you all you need to know about ‘the blind leading the blind’ in Westminster. Heywood was a brilliant courtier-fixer but he didn’t care about management and operational excellence. Whitehall now incentivises the promotion of courtier-fixers, not great managers like Groves and Mueller. Management, like science, isregarded contemptuously as something for the lower orders to think about, not the ‘strategists’ at the top.
Long-term leadership from the likes of O’Donnell and Heywood is why officials know that practically nobody is ever held accountable regardless of the scale of failure. Being in charge of massive screwups is no barrier to promotion. Operational excellence is no requirement for promotion. You will often see the official in charge of some debacle walking to the tube at 4pm (‘compressed hours’ old boy) while the debacle is live on TV (I know because I saw this regularly in the DfE). The senior civil service now operates like a protected caste to preserve its power and privileges regardless of who the ignorant plebs vote for.
You can see how crazy the incentives are when you consider elections. If you look back at recent British elections the difference in the spending plans between the two sides has been a tiny fraction of the £250 billion p/a procurement and contracting budget — yet nobody ever really talks about this budget, it is the great unmentionable subject in Westminster! There’s the odd slogan about ‘let’s cut waste’ but the public rightly ignores this and assumes both sides will do nothing about it out of a mix of ignorance, incompetence and flawed incentives so big powerful companies continue to loot the taxpayer. Look at both parties now just letting the HS2 debacle grow and grow with the budget out of control, the schedule out of control, officials briefing ludicrously that the ‘high speed’ rail will be SLOWED DOWN to reduce costs and so on, all while an army of privileged looters, lobbyists, and lawyers hoover up taxpayer cash.
And now, when Brexit means the entire legal basis for procurement is changing, do these MPs, ministers and officials finally examine it and see how they could improve? No of course not! The top priority for Heywood et al viz Brexit and procurement has been to get hapless ministers to lock Britain into the same nightmare system even after we leave the EU — nothing must disrupt the gravy train! There’s been a lot of talk about £350 million per week for the NHS since the referendum. I could find this in days and in ways that would have strong public support. But nobody is even trying to do this and if some minister took a serious interest, they would soon find all sorts of things going wrong for them until the PermSec has a quiet word and the natural order is restored…
To put the failures of politicians and official in context, it is fascinating that most of the commercial world also ignores the crucial lessons from Groves et al! Most commercial megaprojects are over-schedule, over-budget, and over-promise. The data shows that there has been little improvement over decades. (Cf. What You Should Know About Megaprojects, and Why, Flyvbjerg). And look at this 2019 article in Harvard Business Review which, remarkably, argues that managers in modern MBA programmes are taught NOT TO VALUE OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE! ‘Operational effectiveness — doing the same thing as other companies but doing it exceptionally well — is not a path to sustainable advantage in the competitive universe’, elite managers are taught. The authors have looked at a company data and concluded that, shock horror, operational excellence turns out to be vital after all! They conclude:
‘[T]he management community may have badly underestimated the benefits of core management practices [and] it’s unwise to teach future leaders that strategic decision making and basic management processes are unrelated.’ [!]
The study of management, like politics, is not a field with genuine expertise. Like other social sciences there is widespread ‘cargo cult science’, fads and charlatans drowning out core lessons. This makes it easier to understand the failure of politicians: when elite business schools now teach students NOT to value operational excellence, when supposed management gurus like MacNamara actually push things in a worse direction, then it is less surprising people like Cameron and Heywood don’t know know which way to turn. Imagine the normal politician or senior official in Washington or London. They have almost no exposure to genuinely brilliant managers or very well run organisations. Their exposure is overwhelmingly to ‘normal’ CEOs of public companies and normal bureaucracies. As the most successful investors in world history, Buffett and Munger, have pointed out for over 50 years, many of these corporate CEOs, the supposedly ‘serious people’, don’t know what they are doing and have terrible incentives.
There is almost no research funded on ARPA-PARC principles worldwide. ARPA was deliberately made less like what it was like when it created the internet. The man most responsible for PARC’s success, Robert Taylor, was fired and the most effective team in the history of computing research was disbanded. XEROX notoriously could not overcome its internal incentive problems and let Steve Jobs and Bill Gates develop the ideas. Although politicians love giving speeches about ‘innovation’ and launching projects for PR, governments subsequently almost completely ignored the lessons of how to create superproductive processes and there are almost zero examples of the ARPA-PARC approach in the world today (an interesting partial exception is Janelia). Whitehall, as a subset of its general vandalism towards science, has successfully resisted all attempts at learning from ARPA for decades and this has been helped by the attitude of leading scientists themselves whose incentives push them toward supporting objectively bad funding models. In science as well as politics, incentives can be destructive and stop learning. As Alan Kay, one of the crucial PARC researchers, wrote:
‘The most interesting thing has been the contrast between appreciation/exploitation of the inventions/contributions versus the almost complete lack of curiosity and interest in the processes that produced them… [I]n most processes today — and sadly in most important areas of technology research — the administrators seem to prefer to be completely in control of mediocre processes to being “out of control” with superproductive processes.They are trying to “avoid failure” rather than trying to “capture the heavens”.’’
Or as George Mueller said later in life about the institutional imperative and project failures:
‘Fascinating that the same problems recur time after time, in almost every program, and that the management of the program, whether it happened to be government or industry, continues to avoid reality.’
So, on one hand, radical improvements in non-military spheres would be a wonderful free lunch. We simply apply old lessons, scale them up with technology and there are massive savings for free.
But wouldn’t it be ironic if we don’t do this — instead, we keep our dysfunctional systems for non-military spheres and carry on the waste, failure and corruption but we channel the Cold War and, in the atmosphere of an arms race, America and China apply the lessons from Groves, Schreiver and Mueller but to military AI procurement?!
Not everybody has unlearned the lessons from Groves and Mueller…
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China: a culture of learning from systems management
‘All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.’ von Neumann.
In Science there was an interesting article on Qian Xuesen, the godfather of China’s nuclear and space programs which also had a profound affect on ideas about government. Qian studied in California at Caltech where he worked with the Hungarian mathematician Theodore von Kármán who co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) which worked on rockets after 1945.
‘In the West, systems engineering’s heyday has long passed. But in China, the discipline is deeply integrated into national planning. The city of Wuhan is preparing to host in August the International Conference on Control Science and Systems Engineering, which focuses on topics such as autonomous transportation and the “control analysis of social and human systems.” Systems engineers have had a hand in projects as diverse as hydropower dam construction and China’s social credit system, a vast effort aimed at using big data to track citizens’ behavior. Systems theory “doesn’t just solve natural sciences problems, social science problems, and engineering technology problems,” explains Xue Huifeng, director of the China Aerospace Laboratory of Social System Engineering (CALSSE) and president of the China Academy of Aerospace Systems Science and Engineering in Beijing. “It also solves governance problems.”
‘The field has resonated with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who in 2013 said that “comprehensively deepening reform is a complex systems engineering problem.” So important is the discipline to the Chinese Communist Party that cadres in its Central Party School in Beijing are required to study it. By applying systems engineering to challenges such as maintaining social stability, the Chinese government aims to “not just understand reality or predict reality, but to control reality,” says Rogier Creemers, a scholar of Chinese law at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies in the Netherlands…
‘In a building flanked by military guards, systems scientists from CALSSE sit around a large conference table, explaining to Science the complex diagrams behind their studies on controlling systems. The researchers have helped model resource management and other processes in smart cities powered by artificial intelligence. Xue, who oversees a project named for Qian at CALSSE, traces his work back to the U.S.-educated scientist. “You should not forget your original starting point,” he says…
‘The Chinese government claims to have wired hundreds of cities with sensors that collect data on topics including city service usage and crime. At the opening ceremony of China’s 19th Party Congress last fall, Xi said smart cities were part of a “deep integration of the internet, big data, and artificial intelligence with the real economy.”… Xue and colleagues, for example, are working on how smart cities can manage water resources. In Guangdong province, the researchers are evaluating how to develop a standardized approach for monitoring water use that might be extended to other smart cities.
‘But Xue says that smart cities are as much about preserving societal stability as streamlining transportation flows and mitigating air pollution. Samantha Hoffman, a consultant with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, says the program is tied to long-standing efforts to build a digital surveillance infrastructure and is “specifically there for social control reasons” (Science, 9 February, p. 628). The smart cities initiative builds on 1990s systems engineering projects — the “golden” projects — aimed at dividing cities into geographic grids for monitoring, she adds.
‘Layered onto the smart cities project is another systems engineering effort: China’s social credit system. In 2014, the country’s State Council outlined a plan to compile data on individuals, government officials, and companies into a nationwide tracking system by 2020. The goal is to shape behavior by using a mixture of carrots and sticks. In some citywide and commercial pilot projects already underway, individuals can be dinged for transgressions such as spreading rumors online. People who receive poor marks in the national system may eventually be barred from travel and denied access to social services, according to government documents…
‘Government documents refer to the social credit system as a “social systems engineering project.” Details about which systems engineers consulted on the project are scant. But one theory that may have proved useful is Qian’s “open complex giant system,” Zhu says. A quarter-century ago, Qian proposed that society is a system comprising millions of subsystems: individual persons, in human parlance. Maintaining control in such a system is challenging because people have diverse backgrounds, hold a broad spectrum of opinions, and communicate using a variety of media, he wrote in 1993 in the Journal of Systems Engineering and Electronics. His answer sounds like an early road map for the social credit system: to use then-embryonic tools such as artificial intelligence to collect and synthesize reams of data. According to published papers, China’s hard systems scientists also use approaches derived from Qian’s work to monitor public opinion and gauge crowd behavior…
‘Hard systems engineering worked well for rocket science, but not for more complex social problems, Gu says: “We realized we needed to change our approach.” He felt strongly that any methods used in China had to be grounded in Chinese culture.
‘The duo came up with what it called the WSR approach: It integrated wuli, an investigation of facts and future scenarios; shili, the mathematical and conceptual models used to organize systems; and renli. Though influenced by U.K. systems thinking, the approach was decidedly eastern, its precepts inspired by the emphasis on social relationships in Chinese culture. Instead of shunning mathematical approaches, WSR tried to integrate them with softer inquiries, such as taking stock of what groups a project would benefit or harm. WSR has since been used to calculate wait times for large events in China and to determine how China’s universities perform, among other projects…
‘Zhu … recently wrote that systems science in China is “under a rationalistic grip, with the ‘scientific’ leg long and the democratic leg short.” Zhu says he has no doubt that systems scientists can make projects such as the social credit system more effective. However, he cautions, “Systems approaches should not be just a convenient tool in the expert’s hands for realizing the party’s wills. They should be a powerful weapon in people’s hands for building a fair, just, prosperous society.”’
In Open Complex Giant System (1993), Qian Xuesen compares the study of physics, where large complex systems can be studied using the phenomenally successful tools of statistical mechanics, and the study of society which has no such methods. He describes an overall approach in which fields spanning physical sciences, study of the mind, medicine, geoscience and so on must be integrated in a sort of uber-field he calls ‘social systems engineering‘.
‘Studies and practices have clearly proved that the only feasible and effective way to treat an open complex giant system is a metasynthesis from the qualitative to the quantitative, i.e. the meta—synthetic engineering method. This method has been extracted, generalized and abstracted from practical studies…’
This involves integrating: scientific theories, data, quantitative models, qualitative practical expert experience into ‘models built from empirical data and reference material, with hundreds and thousands of parameters’ then simulated.
‘This is quantitative knowledge arising from qualitative understanding. Thus metasynthesis from qualitative to quantitative approach is to unite organically the expert group, data, all sorts of information, and the computer technology, and to unite scien- tific theory of various disciplines and human experience and knowledge.’
He gives some examples and gives this diagram as a high level summary:
So, China is combining:
A massive ~$150 billion data science/AI investment program with the goal of global leadership in the science/technology and economic dominance.
A massive investment program in associated science/technology such as quantum information/computing.
A massive domestic surveillance program combining AI, facial recognition, genetic identification, the ‘social credit system’ and so on.
A massive anti-access/area denial military program aimed at America/Taiwan.
A massive technology espionage program that, for example, successfully stole the software codes for the F-35.
The use of proven systems management techniques for integrating principles of effective action to predict and manage complex systems at large scale.
America led the development of AI technologies and has the huge assets of its universities, a tradition (weakening) of welcoming scientists (since they opened Princeton to Einstein, von Neumann and Gödel in the 1930s), and the ecosystem of places like Silicon Valley.
It is plausible that China could find a way within 15 years to find some nonlinear asymmetries that provide an edge while, channeling Marshal Ogarkov, it outthinks the Pentagon in management and operations.
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A few interesting recent straws in the AI/robotics wind
I blogged recently about Judea Pearl. He is one of the most important scholars in the field of causal reasoning. He wrote a short paper about the limits of state-of-the-art AI systems using ‘deep learning’ neural networks — such as the AlphaGo system which recently conquered the game of GO — and how these systems could be improved. Humans can interrogate stored representations of their environment with counter-factual questions: how to instantiate this in machines? (Also economists, NB. Pearl’s statement that ‘I can hardly name a handful (<6) of economists who can answer even one causal question posed in ucla.in/2mhxKdO‘.)
In an interview he said this about self-aware robots:
‘If a machine does not have a model of reality, you cannot expect the machine to behave intelligently in that reality. The first step, one that will take place in maybe 10 years, is that conceptual models of reality will be programmed by humans. The next step will be that machines will postulate such models on their own and will verify and refine them based on empirical evidence. That is what happened to science; we started with a geocentric model, with circles and epicycles, and ended up with a heliocentric model with its ellipses.
‘We’re going to have robots with free will, absolutely. We have to understand how to program them and what we gain out of it. For some reason, evolution has found this sensation of free will to be computationally desirable… Evidently, it serves some computational function.
‘I think the first evidence will be if robots start communicating with each other counterfactually, like “You should have done better.” If a team of robots playing soccer starts to communicate in this language, then we’ll know that they have a sensation of free will. “You should have passed me the ball — I was waiting for you and you didn’t!” “You should have” means you could have controlled whatever urges made you do what you did, and you didn’t.
[When will robots be evil?] When it appears that the robot follows the advice of some software components and not others, when the robot ignores the advice of other components that are maintaining norms of behavior that have been programmed into them or are expected to be there on the basis of past learning. And the robot stops following them.’
A DARPA project recently published this on self-aware robots.
‘A robot that learns what it is, from scratch, with zero prior knowledge of physics, geometry, or motor dynamics. Initially the robot does not know if it is a spider, a snake, an arm—it has no clue what its shape is. After a brief period of “babbling,” and within about a day of intensive computing, their robot creates a self-simulation. The robot can then use that self-simulator internally to contemplate and adapt to different situations, handling new tasks as well as detecting and repairing damage in its own body…
‘Initially, the robot moved randomly and collected approximately one thousand trajectories, each comprising one hundred points. The robot then used deep learning, a modern machine learning technique, to create a self-model. The first self-models were quite inaccurate, and the robot did not know what it was, or how its joints were connected. But after less than 35 hours of training, the self-model became consistent with the physical robot to within about four centimeters…
‘Lipson … notes that self-imaging is key to enabling robots to move away from the confinements of so-called “narrow-AI” towards more general abilities. “This is perhaps what a newborn child does in its crib, as it learns what it is,” he says. “We conjecture that this advantage may have also been the evolutionary origin of self-awareness in humans. While our robot’s ability to imagine itself is still crude compared to humans, we believe that this ability is on the path to machine self-awareness.”
‘Lipson believes that robotics and AI may offer a fresh window into the age-old puzzle of consciousness. “Philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists have been pondering the nature self-awareness for millennia, but have made relatively little progress,” he observes. “We still cloak our lack of understanding with subjective terms like ‘canvas of reality,’ but robots now force us to translate these vague notions into concrete algorithms and mechanisms.”
‘Lipson and Kwiatkowski are aware of the ethical implications. “Self-awareness will lead to more resilient and adaptive systems, but also implies some loss of control,” they warn. “It’s a powerful technology, but it should be handled with care.”’
‘… a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text, achieves state-of-the-art performance on many language modeling benchmarks, and performs rudimentary reading comprehension, machine translation, question answering, and summarization — all without task-specific training… The model is chameleon-like — it adapts to the style and content of the conditioning text. This allows the user to generate realistic and coherent continuations about a topic of their choosing… Our model is capable of generating samples from a variety of prompts that feel close to human quality and show coherence over a page or more of text… These samples have substantial policy implications: large language models are becoming increasingly easy to steer towards scalable, customized, coherent text generation, which in turn could be used in a number of beneficial as well as malicious ways.’ (bold added).
OpenAI has not released the full model yet because they take safety issues seriously. Cf. this for a discussion of some safety issues and links. As the author says re some of the complaints about OpenAI not releasing the full model, when you find normal cyber security flaws you do not publish the problem immediately — that is a ‘zero day attack’ and we should not ‘promote a norm that zero-day threats are OK in AI.’ Quite. It’s also interesting that it would probably only take ~$100,000 for a resourceful individual to re-create the full model quite quickly.
A few weeks ago, Deep Mind showed that their approach to beating human champions at GO can also beat the world’s best players at StarCraft, a game of IMperfect information which is much closer to real life human competitions than perfect information games like chess and GO. OpenAI has shown something similar with a similar game, DOTA.
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Moore’s Law: what if a country spends 1-10% GDP pushing such curves?
The march of Moore’s Law is entangled in many predictions. It is true that in some ways Moore’s Law has flattened out recently…
… BUT specialised chips developed for machine learning and other adaptations have actually kept it going. This chart shows how it actually started long before Moore and has been remarkably steady for ~120 years (NVIDIA in the top right is specialised for deep learning)…
NB. This is a logarithmic scale so makes progress seem much less dramatic than the ~20 orders of magnitude it represents.
Since Von Neumann and Turing led the development of the modern computer in the 1940s, the price of computation has got ~x10 cheaper every five years (so x100 per decade), so over ~75 years that’s a factor of about a thousand trillion (1015).
The industry seems confident the graph above will continue roughly as it has for at least another decade, though not because of continued transistor doubling rates which has reached such a tiny nanometer scale that quantum effects will soon interfere with engineering. This means ~100-fold improvement before 2030 and combined with the ecosystem of entrepreneurs/VC/science investment etc this will bring many major disruptions even without significant progress with general intelligence.
Dominant companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, Baidu, Alibaba etc (NB. no big EU players) have extremely strong incentives to keep this trend going given the impact of mobile computing / the cloud etc on their revenues.
Computers will be ~10,000 times more powerful than today for the same price if this chart holds for another20 years and ~1 million times more powerful for the same price than today if it holds for another 30 years. Today’s multi-billion dollar supercomputer performance would be available for ~$1,000, just as the supercomputer power of a few decades ago is now available in your smartphone.
But there is another dimension to this trend. Look at this graph below. It shows the total amount of compute, in petaflop/s-days, that was used to train some selected AI projects using neural networks / deep learning.
‘Since 2012, the amount of compute used in the largest AI training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.5 month-doubling time (by comparison, Moore’s Law had an 18-month doubling period). Since 2012, this metric has grown by more than 300,000x (an 18-month doubling period would yield only a 12x increase)… The chart shows the total amount of compute, in petaflop/s-days, that was used to train selected results that are relatively well known, used a lot of compute for their time, and gave enough information to estimate the compute used. A petaflop/s-day (pfs-day) consists of performing 1015neural net operations per second for one day, or a total of about 1020operations. ‘ (Cf. OpenAI blog.)
The AlphaZero project in the top right is the recent Deep Mind project in which an AI system (a successor to the original AlphaGo that first beat human GO champions) zoomed by centuries of human knowledge on GO and chess in about one day of training.
Many dramatic breakthroughs in machine learning, particularly using neural networks (NNs), are open source. They are scaling up very fast. They will be networked together into ‘networks of networks’ and will become x10, x100, x1,000 more powerful. These NNs will keep demonstrating better than human performance in relatively narrowly defined tasks (like winning games) but these narrow definitions will widen unpredictably.
OpenAI’s blog showing the above graph concludes:
‘Overall, given the data above, the precedent for exponential trends in computing, work on ML specific hardware, and the economic incentives at play, we think it’d be a mistake to be confident this trend won’t continue in the short term. Past trends are not sufficient to predict how long the trend will continue into the future, or what will happen while it continues. But even the reasonable potential for rapid increases in capabilities means it is critical to start addressing both safety and malicious use of AI today. Foresight is essential to responsible policymaking and responsible technological development, and we must get out ahead of these trends rather than belatedly reacting to them.’ (Bold added)
This recent analysis of the extremely rapid growth of deep learning systems tries to estimate how long this rapid growth can continue and what interesting milestones may fall. It considers 1) the rate of growth of cost, 2) the cost of current experiments, and 3) the maximum amount that can be spent on an experiment in the future. Its rough answers are:
‘The cost of the largest experiments is increasing by an order of magnitude every 1.1 – 1.4 years.
‘The largest current experiment, AlphaGo Zero, probably cost about $10M.’
On the basis of the Manhattan Project costing ~1% of GDP, that gives ~$200 billion for one AI experiment. Given the growth rate, we could expect a $200B experiment in 5-6 years.
‘There is a range of estimates for how many floating point operations per second are required to simulate a human brain for one second. Those collected by AI Impacts have a median of 1018 FLOPS (corresponding roughly to a whole-brain simulation using Hodgkin-Huxley neurons)’. [NB. many experts think 1018 is off by orders of magnitude and it could easily be x1,000 or more higher.]
‘So for the shortest estimates … we have already reached enough compute to pass the human-childhood milestone. For the median estimate, and the Hodgkin-Huxley estimates, we will have reached the milestone within 3.5 years.’
We will not reach the bigger estimates (~1025FLOPS) within the 10 year window.
‘The AI-Compute trend is an extraordinarily fast trend that economic forces (absent large increases in GDP) cannot sustain beyond 3.5-10 more years. Yet the trend is also fast enough that if it is sustained for even a few years from now, it will sweep past some compute milestones that could plausibly correspond to the requirements for AGI, including the amount of compute required to simulate a human brain thinking for eighteen years, using Hodgkin Huxley neurons.’
I can’t comment on the technical aspects of this but one political/historical point. I think this analysis is wrong about the Manhattan Project (MP). His argument is the MP represents a reasonable upper-bound for what America might spend. But the MP was not constrained by money — it was mainly constrained by theoretical and engineering challenges, constraints of non-financial resources and so on. Having studied General Groves’ book (who ran the MP), he does not say money was a problem — in fact, one of the extraordinary aspects of the story is the extreme (to today’s eyes) measures he took to ensure money was not a problem. If more than 1% GDP had been needed, he’d have got it (until the intelligence came in from Europe that the Nazi programme was not threatening).
This is an important analogy. America and China are investing very heavily in AI but nobody knows — are there places at the edge of ‘breakthroughs with relatively narrow applications’ where suddenly you push ‘a bit’ and you get lollapalooza results with general intelligence? What if someone thinks — if I ‘only’ need to add some hardware and I can muster, say, 100 billion dollars to buy it, maybe I could take over the world? What if they’re right?
I think it is therefore more plausible to use the US defence budget at the height of the Cold War as a ‘reasonable estimate’ for what America might spend if they feel they are in an existential struggle. Washington knows that China is putting vast resources into AI research. If it starts taking over from Deep Mind and OpenAI as the place where the edge-of-the-art is discovered, then it WILL soon be seen as an existential struggle and there would rapidly be political pressures for a 1950s/1960s style ‘extreme’ response. So a reasonable upper bound might be at least 5-8 times bigger than 1% of GDP.
Further, unlike the nuclear race, an AGI race carries implications of not just ‘destroy global civilisation and most people’ but ‘potentially destroys ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING not just on earth but, given time and the speed of light, everywhere’ — i.e potentially all molecules re-assembled in the pursuit of some malign energy-information optimisation process. Once people realise just how bad AGI could go if the alignment problem is not solved (see below), would it not be reasonable to assume that even more money than ~8% GDP will be found if/when this becomes a near-term fear of politicians?
Some in Silicon Valley who already have many billions at their disposal are already calculating numbers for these budgets. Surely people in Chinese intelligence are doodling the same as they listen to the week’s audio of Larry talking to Demis…?
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General intelligence and safety
‘[R]ational systems exhibit universal drives towards self-protection, resource acquisition, replication and efficiency. Those drives will lead to anti-social and dangerous behaviour if not explicitly countered. The current computing infrastructure would be very vulnerable to unconstrained systems with these drives.’ Omohundro.
Shane Legg, co-founder and chief scientist of Deep Mind, said publicly a few years ago that there is a 50% probability that we will achieve human level AI by 2028, a 90% probability by 2050, and ‘I think human extinction will probably occur‘. Given Deep Mind’s progress since he said this it is surely unlikely he thinks the odds now are lower than 50% by 2028. Some at the leading edge of the field agree.
‘I think that within a few years we’ll be able to build an NN-based [neural network] AI (an NNAI) that incrementally learns to become at least as smart as a little animal, curiously and creatively learning to plan, reason and decompose a wide variety of problems into quickly solvable sub-problems. Once animal-level AI has been achieved, the move towards human-level AI may be small: it took billions of years to evolve smart animals, but only a few millions of years on top of that to evolve humans. Technological evolution is much faster than biological evolution, because dead ends are weeded out much more quickly. Once we have animal-level AI, a few years or decades later we may have human-level AI, with truly limitless applications. Every business will change and all of civilisation will change…
‘In 2050 there will be trillions of self-replicating robot factories on the asteroid belt. A few million years later, AI will colonise the galaxy. Humans are not going to play a big role there, but that’s ok. We should be proud of being part of a grand process that transcends humankind.’ Schmidhuber, one of the pioneers of ML, 2016.
Others have said they believe that estimates of AGI within 15-30 years are unlikely to be right. Two of the smartest people I’ve ever spoken to are physicists who understand the technical details and know the key researchers and think that dozens of Nobel Prize scale ideas will probably be needed before AGI happens and it is more likely that the current wave of enthusiasm with machine learning/neural networks will repeat previous cycles in science (e.g with quantum computing 20 years ago) — great enthusiasm, the feeling that all barriers are quickly falling, then an increasingly obvious plateau, spreading disillusion, a search for new ideas, then a revival of hope and so on. They would bet more on a 50-80 year than a 20 year scale.
Of top people I have spoken to and/or followed their predictions, it’s clear that there is a consensus that mainstream economic analysis (which is the foundation of politicians’ and media discussion) seriously underestimates the scale and speed of social/economic/military/political disruption that narrow AI/automation will soon cause. But predictions on AGI are unsurprisingly all over the place.
Many argue there even if Moore’s Law continues for 30 years (millionfold performance improvement) this may mean nothing significant for general intelligence, even if narrow AI transforms the world in many ways. Some experts think that estimates of the human brain’s computational capacity widely believed in the computer science world are actually orders of magnitude wrong. We still don’t know much about basics of the brain such as how long-term memories are formed. Maybe the brain’s processes will be much more resistant to understanding than ‘optimists’ assume.
But maybe relatively few big new ideas are needed to create world-changing capabilities. ‘Just’ applying great engineering and more resources to existing ideas allowed Deep Mind to blow past human performance metrics. I obviously cannot judge competing expert views but from a political perspective we know for sure that there is inherent uncertainty about how we discover new knowledge and this means we are bound to be surprised in all sorts of ways. We know that even brilliant researchers working right at the edge of progress are often clueless about what will happen quite soon and cannot reliably judge ‘is it less than 1% or more like 20% probability?’ questions. For example:
‘In 1901, two years before helping build the first heavier-than-air flyer, Wilbur Wright told his brother that powered flight was fifty years away. In 1939, three years before he personally oversaw the first critical chain reaction in a pile of uranium bricks, Enrico Fermi voiced 90% confidence that it was impossible to use uranium to sustain a fission chain reaction.’ (Yudkowsky)
Fermi’s experience suggests we should be extremely careful and put more resources into thinking very hard about how to minimise risks viz both narrow and general AI.
Those right at the edge of genetic engineering, such as George Church and Kevin Esvelt, are pushing for their field to be forcibly opened up to make it safer. As they argue, the current scientific approach and incentive system is essentially a ‘blind search algorithm’ in which small teams work in secret without being able to predict the consequences of their work and cannot be warned by those who do understand. A blind search algorithm is a bad approach for things like bioweapons that can destroy billions of lives and it is what we now have. The same argument applies to AGI.
We also know that political people and governments are slow to cope with major technological disruptions. Just look at TV. It’s been dominating politics since the 1950s. It is roughly 70 years old. Many politicians still do not understand it well. The UK state and political parties are in many ways much less sophisticated in its use of TV than groups like Hezbollah. This is even more true of social media. Also look at how unfounded conspiracy theories about fake news and social media viz the referendum and Trump have gripped much of the ‘educated’ class that thinks they see through fake news that fools the uneducated! Journalists are awarded THE ORWELL AWARD(!) for spreading fake news about fake news (and it’s not ‘lies’, they actually believe what they say)! (My experience is it’s much easier to fool people about politics if they have a degree than if they don’t because those with a degree tend to spend so much more energy fooling themselves.) This is not encouraging particularly if one considers that politicians are directly incentivised to understand technologies like TV and internet polling for their own short-term interests yet most don’t.
From cars to planes it has taken time for us to work out how to adapt to new things that can kill us. Given that 1) conventional research is ‘a blind search algorithm’, 2) our politicians are behind the curve on 70 year-old technologies and 3) there is little prospect of this changing without huge changes to conventional models of politics, we must ask another question about secrecy v openness and centralised vs decentralised architectures.
One of the leaders of the 3D printing / FabLab revolution wrote this comparing the closed v open models of security:
‘The history of the Internet has shown that security through obscurity doesn’t work. Systems that have kept their inner workings a secret in the name of security have consistently proved more vulnerable than those that have allowed themselves to be examined — and challenged — by outsiders. The open protocols and programs used to protect Internet communications are the result of ongoing development and testing by a large expert community. Another historical lesson is that people, not technology, are the most common weakness when it comes to security. No matter how secure a system is, someone who has access to it can always be corrupted, wittingly or otherwise. Centralized control introduces a point of vulnerability that is not present in a distributed system.’ (Bold added)
As we saw above, the centralised approach has been a disaster for nuclear weapons and we survived by fluke. Overall the history of nuclear security is surely a very relevant and bad signal for AI safety. I would bet a lot that Deep Mind et al are all hacked and spied on by China and Russia (at least) so I think it’s safest to plan on the assumption that dangerous breakthroughs will leak almost instantly and could be applied by the sort of people who spy for intel agencies. So it is natural to ask, should we take an open/decentralised approach towards possible AGI?
(Tangential thought experiment: if you were in charge of an organisation like the KGB, why would you not hack hedge funds like Renaissance Technologies and use the information for your own ‘black’ hedge fund and thus dodge the need for arguments over funding (a ‘virtuous’ circle of espionage, free money, resources for more effective R&D and espionage plus it minimises the need for irritating interactions with politicians)? How hard would it be to detect such activity IF done with intelligent modesty? Given someone can hack the NSA without their identity being revealed, why would they not be hacking Renaissance and Deep Mind, with a bit of help from a Milla Jovovich lookalike whose reading a book on n-dimensional string theory at the bar when that exhausted physics PhD with the access codes staggers in to relax?)
This seems to collide with another big problem — the alignment problem.
Stuart Russell, one of the world’s leading researchers, is one of those who has been very forceful about the fundamental importance of this: how do we GUARANTEE that entities more intelligent than us are aligned with humanity’s interests?
‘One [view] is: It’ll never happen, which is like saying we are driving towards the cliff but we’re bound to run out of gas before we get there. And that doesn’t seem like a good way to manage the affairs of the human race. And the other [view] is: Not to worry — we will just build robots that collaborate with us and we’ll be in human-robot teams. Which begs the question: If your robot doesn’t agree with your objectives, how do you form a team with it?’ .
Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the few working on the alignment problem, described the difficulty:
‘How do you encode the goal functions of an A.I. such that it has an Off switch and it wants there to be an Off switch and it won’t try to eliminate the Off switch and it will let you press the Off switch, but it won’t jump ahead and press the Off switch itself? And if it self-modifies, will it self-modify in such a way as to keep the Off switch? We’re trying to work on that. It’s not easy… When you’re building something smarter than you, you have to get it right on the first try.’
So, we know centralised systems are very vulnerable and decentralised systems have advantages, but with AGI we also have to fear that we have no room for the trial-and-error of decentralised internet style security architectures — ‘you have to get it right on the first try’. Are we snookered?! And of course there is no guarantee it is even possible to solve the alignment problem. When you hear people in this field describing ideas about ‘abstracting human ethics and encoding them’ one wonders if solving the alignment problem might prove even harder than AGI — maybe only an AGI could solve it…
Given the media debate is dominated by endless pictures of the Terminator and politicians are what they are, researchers are, understandably, extremely worried about what might happen if the political-media system makes a sudden transition from complacency to panic. After all, consider the global reaction if reputable scientists suddenly announced they have discovered plausible signals that super-intelligent aliens will arrive on earth within 30 years: even when softened by caveats, such a warning would obviously transform our culture (in many ways positively!). As Peter Thiel has said, creating true AGI is a close equivalent to the ‘super-intelligent aliens arriving on earth’ scenario and the most important questions are not economic but political, and in particular: are they friendly and can we stop them eliminating us by design, bad luck, or indifference?
Further, in my experience extremely smart technical people are often naive about politics. They greatly over-estimate the abilities of prime ministers and presidents. They greatly under-estimate the incentive problems and the degree of focus that is required to get ANYTHING done in politics. They greatly exaggerate the potential for ‘rational argument’ to change minds and wrongly assume somewhere at the top of power ‘there must be’ a group of really smart people working on very dangerous problems who have real clout. Further, everybody thinks they understand ‘communication’ but almost nobody does. We can see from recent events that even the very best engineering companies like Facebook and Google can not just make huge mistakes with the political/communication world but not learn (Facebook hiring Clegg was a sign of deep ignorance inside Facebook about their true problems). So it’s hard to be optimistic about the technical people educating the political people even assuming the technical people make progress with safety.
Hypothesis: 1) minimising nuclear/bio/AI risks and the potential for disastrous climate change requires a few very big things to change roughly simultaneously (‘normal’ political action will not be enough) and 2) this will require a weird alliance between a) technical people, b) political ‘renegades’, c) the public to ‘surround’ political Insiders locked into existing incentives:
Different ‘models for effective action’ among powerful people, which will only happen if either (A) some freak individual/group pops up, probably in a crisis environment or (B) somehow incentives are hacked. (A) can’t be relied on and (B) is very hard.
A new institution with global reach that can win global trust and support is needed. The UN is worse than useless for these purposes.
Public opinion will have to be mobilised to overcome the resistance of political Insiders, for example, regarding the potential for technology to bring very large gains ‘to me’ and simultaneously avert extreme dangers. This connects to the very widespread view that a) the existing economic model is extremely unfair and b) this model is sustained by a loose alliance of political elites and corporate looters who get richer by screwing the rest of us.
I have an idea about a specific project, mixing engineering/economics/psychology/politics, that might do this and will blog on it separately.
I suspect almost any idea that could do 1-3 will seem at least weird but without big changes, we are simply waiting for the law of averages to do its thing. We may have decades for AGI and climate change but we could collide with the WMD law of averages tomorrow so, impractical as this sounds, it seems to me people have to try new things and risk failure and ridicule.
Please leave comments/corrections below…
Further reading
An excellent essay by Ian Hogarth, AI nationalism, which covers some of the same ground but is written by someone with deep connections to the field whereas I am extremely non-expert but interested.
Autonomous technology and the greater human good. Omohundro. ‘Military and economic pressures are driving the rapid development of autonomous systems. We show that these systems are likely to behave in anti-social and harmful ways unless they are very carefully designed. Designers will be motivated to create systems that act approximately rationally and rational systems exhibit universal drives towards self-protection, resource acquisition, replication and efficiency. Those drives will lead to anti-social and dangerous behaviour if not explicitly countered. The current computing infrastructure would be very vulnerable to unconstrained systems with these drives. We describe the use of formal methods to create provably safe but limited autonomous systems. We then discuss harmful systems and how to stop them. We conclude with a description of the ‘Safe-AI Scaffolding Strategy’ for creating powerful safe systems with a high confidence of safety at each stage of development.’ I strongly recommend reading this paper if interested in this blog.
Read this 1955 essay by von Neumann ‘Can we survive technology?‘. VN was involved in the Manhattan Project, inventing computer science, game theory and much more. This essay explored the essential problem that the scale and speed of technological change have suddenly blown past political institutions. ‘For progress there is no cure…’
Britain could contribute huge value to the world by leveraging existing assets, including scientific talent and how the NHS is structured, to push the frontiers of a rapidly evolving scientific field — genomic prediction — that is revolutionising healthcare in ways that give Britain some natural advantages over Europe and America. We should plan for free universal ‘SNP’ genetic sequencing as part of a shift to genuinely preventive medicine — a shift that will lessen suffering, save money, help British advanced technology companies in genomics and data science/AI, make Britain more attractive for scientists and global investment, and extend human knowledge in a crucial field to the benefit of the whole world.
‘SNP’ sequencing means, crudely, looking at the million or so most informative markers or genetic variants without sequencing every base pair in the genome. SNP sequencing costs ~$50 per person (less at scale), whole genome sequencing costs ~$1,000 per person (less at scale). The former captures most of the predictive power now possible at 1/20th of the cost of the latter.
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Background: what seemed ‘sci fi’ ~2010-13 is now reality
In my 2013 essay on education and politics, I summarised the view of expert scientists on genetics (HERE between pages 49-51, 72-74, 194-203). Although this was only a small part of the essay most of the media coverage focused on this, particularly controversies about IQ.
Regardless of political affiliation most of the policy/media world, as a subset of ‘the educated classes’ in general, tended to hold a broadly ‘blank slate’ view of the world mostly uninformed by decades of scientific progress. Technical terms like ‘heritability’, which refers to the variance in populations, caused a lot of confusion.
When my essay hit the media, fortunately for me the world’s leading expert, Robert Plomin, told hacks that I had summarised the state of the science accurately. (I never tried to ‘give my views on the science’ as I don’t have ‘views’ — all people like me can try to do with science is summarise the state of knowledge in good faith.) Quite a lot of hacks then spent some time talking to Plomin and some even wrote about how they came to realise that their assumptions about the science had been wrong (e.g Gaby Hinsliff).
Many findings are counterintuitive to say the least. Almost everybody naturally thinks that ‘the shared environment’ in the form of parental influence ‘obviously’ has a big impact on things like cognitive development. The science says this intuition is false. The shared environment is much less important than we assume and has very little measurable effect on cognitive development: e.g an adopted child who does an IQ test in middle age will show on average almost no correlation with the parents who brought them up (genes become more influential as you age). People in the political world assumed a story of causation in which, crudely, wealthy people buy better education and this translates into better exam and IQ scores. The science says this story is false. Environmental effects on things like cognitive ability and education achievement are almost all from what is known as the ‘non-shared environment’ which has proved very hard to pin down (environmental effects that differ for children, like random exposure to chemicals in utero). Further, ‘The case for substantial genetic influence on g [g = general intelligence ≈ IQ] is stronger than for any other human characteristic’ (Plomin) and g/IQ has far more predictive power for future education than class does. All this has been known for years, sometimes decades, by expert scientists but is so contrary to what well-educated people want to believe that it was hardly known at all in ‘educated’ circles that make and report on policy.
Another big problem is that widespread ignorance about genetics extends to social scientists/economists, who are much more influential in politics/government than physical scientists. A useful heuristic is to throw ~100% of what you read from social scientists about ‘social mobility’ in the bin. Report after report repeats the same clichés, repeats factual errors about genetics, and is turned into talking points for MPs as justification for pet projects. ‘Kids who can read well come from homes with lots of books so let’s give families with kids struggling to read more books’ is the sort of argument you read in such reports without any mention of the truth: children and parents share genes that make them good at and enjoy reading, so causation is operating completely differently to the assumptions. It is hard to overstate the extent of this problem. (There are things we can do about ‘social mobility’, my point is Insider debate is awful.)
A related issue is that really understanding the science requires serious understanding of statistics and, now, AI/machine learning (ML). Many social scientists do not have this training. This problem will get worse as data science/AI invades the field.
A good example is ‘early years’ and James Heckman. The political world is obsessed with ‘early years’ such as Sure Start (UK) and Head Start (US). Politicians latch onto any ‘studies’ that seem to justify it and few have any idea about the shocking state of the studies usually quoted to justify spending decisions. Heckman has published many papers on early years and they are understandably widely quoted by politicians and the media. Heckman is a ‘Nobel Prize’ winner in economics. One of the world’s leading applied mathematicians, Professor Andrew Gelman, has explained how Heckman has repeatedly made statistical errors in his papers but does not correct them: cf. How does a Nobel-prize-winning economist become a victim of bog-standard selection bias?This really shows the scale of the problem: if a Nobel-winning economist makes ‘bog standard’ statistical errors that confuse him about studies on pre-school, what chance do the rest of us in the political/media world have?
Consider further that genomics now sometimes applies very advanced mathematical ideas such as ‘compressed sensing’. Inevitably few social scientists can judge such papers but they are overwhelmingly responsible for interpreting such things for ministers and senior officials. This is compounded by the dominance of social scientists in Whitehall units responsible for data and evidence. Many of these units are unable to provide proper scientific advice to ministers (I have had personal experience of this in the Department for Education). Two excellent articles by Duncan Watts recently explained fundamental problems with social science and what could be done (e.g a much greater focus on successful prediction) but as far as I can tell they have had no impact on economists and sociologists who do not want to face their lack of credibility and whose incentives in many ways push them towards continued failure (Nature paper HERE, Science paper HERE — NB. the Department for Education did not even subscribe to the world’s leading science journals until I insisted in 2011).
1) The problem that the evidence for early years is not what ministers and officials think it is is not a reason to stop funding but I won’t go into this now. 2) This problem is incontrovertible evidence, I think, of the value of an alpha data science unit in Downing Street, able to plug into the best researchers around the world, and ensure that policy decisions are taken on the basis of rational thinking and good science or, just as important, everybody is aware that they have to make decisions in the absence of this. This unit would pay for itself in weeks by identifying flawed reasoning and stopping bad projects, gimmicks etc. Of course, this idea has no chance with those now at the top of Government and the Cabinet Office would crush such a unit as it would threaten the traditional hierarchy. One of thearguments I made in my essay was that we should try to discover useful and reliable benchmarks for what children of different abilities are really capable of learning and build on things like the landmark Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. This obvious idea is anathema to the education policy world where there is almost no interest in things like SMPY and almost everybody supports the terrible idea that ‘all children must do the same exams’ (guaranteeing misery for some and boredom/time wasting for others). NB. Most rigorous large-scale educational RCTs are uninformative. Education research, like psychology, produces a lot of what Feynman called ‘cargo cult science’.
Since 2013, genomics has moved fast and understanding in the UK media has changed probably faster in five years than over the previous 35 years. As with the complexities of Brexit, journalists have caught up with reality much better than MPs. It’s still true that almost everything written by MPs about ‘social mobility’ is junk but you could see from the reviews of Plomin’s recent book, Blueprint, that many journalists have a much better sense of the science than they did in 2013. Rare good news, though much more progress is needed…
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What’s happening now?
In 2013 it was already the case that the numbers on heritability derived from twin and adoption studies were being confirmed by direct inspection of DNA — therefore many of the arguments about twin/adoption studies were redundant — but this fact was hardly known.
I pointed out that the field would change fast. Both Plomin and another expert, Steve Hsu, made many predictions around 2010-13 some of which I referred to in my 2013 essay. Hsu is a physics professor who is also one of the world’s leading researchers on genomics.
Hsu predicted that very large samples of DNA would allow scientists over the next few years to start identifying the actual genes responsible for complex traits, such as diseases and intelligence, and make meaningful predictions about the fate of individuals. Hsu gave estimates of the sample sizes that would be needed. His 2011 talk contains some of these predictions and also provides a physicist’s explanation of ‘what is IQ measuring’. As he said at Google in 2011, the technology is ‘right on the cusp of being able to answer fundamental questions’ and ‘if in ten years we all meet again in this room there’s a very good chance that some of the key questions we’ll know the answers to’. His 2014 paper explains the science in detail. If you spend a little time looking at this, you will know more than 99% of high status economists gabbling on TV about ‘social mobility’ saying things like ‘doing well on IQ tests just proves you can do IQ tests’.
His group and others have applied machine learning to very large genetic samples and built predictors of complex traits. Complex traits like general intelligence and most diseases are ‘polygenic’ — they depend on many genes each of which contributes a little (unlike diseases caused by a single gene).
‘There are now ~20 disease conditions for which we can identify, e.g, the top 1% outliers with 5-10x normal risk for the disease. The papers reporting these results have almost all appeared within the last year or so.’
For example, the height predictor ‘captures nearly all of the predicted SNP heritability for this trait — actual heights of most individuals in validation tests are within a few cm of predicted heights.’ Height is similar to IQ — polygenic and similar heritability estimates.
These predictors have been validated with out-of-sample tests. They will get better and better as more and more data is gathered about more and more traits.
This enables us to take DNA from unborn embryos, do SNP genetic sequencing costing ~$50, and make useful predictions about the odds of the embryo being an outlier for diseases like atrial fibrillation, diabetes, breast cancer, or prostate cancer. NB. It is important that we do not need to sequence the whole genome to do this (see below). We will also be able to make predictions about outliers in cognitive abilities (the high and low ends). (My impression is that predicting Alzheimers is still hampered by a lack of data but this will improve as the data improves.)
There are many big implications. This will obviously revolutionise IVF. ~1 million IVF embryos per year are screened worldwide using less sophisticated tests. Instead of picking embryos at random, parents will start avoiding outliers for disease risks and cognitive problems. Rich people will fly to jurisdictions offering the best services.
Forensics is being revolutionised. First, DNA samples can be used to give useful physical descriptions of suspects because you can identify ethnic group, height, hair colour etc. Second, ‘cold cases’ are now routinely being solved because if a DNA sample exists, then the police can search for cousins of the perpetrator from public DNA databases, then use the cousins to identify suspects. Every month or so now in America a cold case murder is solved and many serial killers are being found using this approach — just this morning I saw what looks to be another example just announced, a murder of an 11 year-old in 1973. (Some companies are resisting this development but they will, I am very confident, be smashed in court and have their reputations trashed unless they change policy fast. The public will have no sympathy for those who stand in the way.)
‘The UK could become the world leader in genomic research by combining population-level genotyping with NHS health records… The US private health insurance system produces the wrong incentives for this kind of innovation: payers are reluctant to fund prevention or early treatment because it is unclear who will capture the ROI [return on investment]… The NHS has the right incentives, the necessary scale, and access to a deep pool of scientific talent. The UK can lead the world into a new era of precision genomic medicine.
‘NHS has already announced an out-of-pocket genotyping service which allows individuals to pay for their own genotyping and to contribute their health + DNA data to scientific research. In recent years NHS has built an impressive infrastructure for whole genome sequencing (cost ~$1k per individual) that is used to treat cancer and diagnose rare genetic diseases. The NHS subsidiary Genomics England recently announced they had reached the milestone of 100k whole genomes…
‘At the meeting, I emphasized the following:
1. NHS should offer both inexpensive (~$50) genotyping (sufficient for risk prediction of common diseases) along with the more expensive $1k whole genome sequencing. This will alleviate some of the negative reaction concerning a “two-tier” NHS, as many more people can afford the former.
2. An in-depth analysis of cost-benefit for population wide inexpensive genotyping would likely show a large net cost savings: the risk predictors are good enough already to guide early interventions that save lives and money. Recognition of this net benefit would allow NHS to replace the $50 out-of-pocket cost with free standard of care.’ (Emphasis added)
NB. In terms of the short-term practicalities it is important that whole genome sequencing costs ~$1,000 (and falling) but is not necessary: a version 1/20th of the cost, looking just at the most informative genetic variants, captures most of the predictive benefits. Some have incentives to distort this, such as companies like Illumina trying to sell expensive machines for whole genome sequencing, which can distort policy — let’s hope officials are watching carefully. These costs will, obviously, keep falling.
This connects to an interesting question… Why was the likely trend in genomics clear ~2010 to Plomin, Hsu and others but invisible to most? Obviously this involves lots of elements of expertise and feel for the field but also they identified FAVOURABLE EXPONENTIALS. Here is the fall in the cost of sequencing a genome compared to Moore’s Law, another famous exponential. The drop over ~18 years has been a factor of ~100,000. Hsu and Plomin could extrapolate that over a decade and figure out what would be possible when combined with other trends they could see. Researchers are already exploring what will be possible as this trend continues.
Identifying favourable exponentials is extremely powerful. Back in the early 1970s, the greatest team of computer science researchers ever assembled (PARC) looked out into the future and tried to imagine what could be possible if they brought that future back to the present and built it. They were trying to ‘compute in the future’. They created personal computing. (Chart by Alan Kay, one of the key researchers — he called it ‘the Gretzky game’ because of Gretzky’s famous line ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.’ The computer is the Alto, the first personal computer that stunned Steve Jobs when he saw a demo. The sketch on the right is of children using a tablet device that Kay drew decades before the iPad was launched.)
Hopefully the NHS and Department for Health will play ‘the Gretzky game’, take expert advice from the likes of Plomin and Hsu and take this opportunity to make the UK a world leader in one of the most important frontiers in science.
We can imagine everybody in the UK being given valuable information about their health for free, truly preventive medicine where we target resources at those most at risk, and early (even in utero) identification of risks.
This would help bootstrap British science into a stronger position with greater resources to study things like CRISPR and the next phase of this revolution — editing genes to fix problems, where clinical trials are already showing success.
It would also give a boost to British AI/data science companies — the laws, rules on data etc should be carefully shaped to ensure that British companies (not Silicon Valley or China) capture most of the financial value (though everybody will gain from the basic science).
These gains would have positive feedback effects on each other, just as investment in basic AI/ML research will have positive feedback effects in many industries.
I have argued many times for the creation of a civilian UK ‘ARPA’ — a centre for high-risk-high-payoff research that has been consistently blocked in Whitehall (see HERE for an account of how ARPA-PARC created the internet and personal computing). This fits naturally with Britain seeking to lead in genomics/AI. Thinking about this is part of a desperately needed overall investigation into the productivity of the British economy and the ecosystem of universities, basic science, venture capital, startups, regulation (data, intellectual property etc) and so on.
There will also be many controversies and problems. The ability to edit genomes — and even edit the germline with ‘gene drives’ so all descendants have the same copy of the gene — is a Promethean power implying extreme responsibilities. On a mundane level, embracing new technology is clearly hard for the NHS with its data infrastructure. Almost everyone I speak to using the NHS has had similar problems that I have had — nightmares with GPs, hospitals, consultants et al being able to share data and records, things going missing, etc. The NHS will be crippled if it can’t fix this, but this is another reason to integrate data science as a core ‘utility’ for the NHS.
On a political note…
Few scientists and even fewer in the tech world are aware of the EU’s legal framework for regulating technology and the implications of the recent Charter of Fundamental Rights (the EU’s Charter, NOT the ECHR) which gives the Commission/ECJ the power to regulate any advanced technology, accelerate the EU’s irrelevance, and incentivise investors to invest outside the EU. In many areas, the EU regulates to help the worst sort of giant corporate looters defending their position against entrepreneurs. Post-Brexit Britain will be outside this jurisdiction and able to make faster and better decisions about regulating technology like genomics, AI and robotics. Prediction: just as Insiders now talk of how we ‘dodged a bullet’ in staying out of the euro, within ~10 years Insiders will talk about being outside the Charter/ECJ and the EU’s regulation of data/AI in similar terms (assuming Brexit happens and UK politicians even try to do something other than copy the EU’s rules).
China is pushing very hard on genomics/AI and regards such fields as crucial strategic ground for its struggle for supremacy with America. America has political and regulatory barriers holding it back on genomics that are much weaker here. Britain cannot stop the development of such science. Britain can choose to be a backwater, to ignore such things and listen to MPs telling fairy stories while the Chinese plough ahead, or it can try to lead. But there is no hiding from the truth and ‘for progress there is no cure’ (von Neumann). We will never be the most important manufacturing nation again but we could lead in crucial sub-fields of advanced technology. As ARPA-PARC showed, tiny investments can create entire new industries and trillions of dollars of value.
Sadly most politicians of Left and Right have little interest in science funding with tremendous implications for future growth, or the broader question of productivity and the ecosystem of science, entrepreneurs, universities, funding, regulation etc, and we desperately need institutions that incentivise politicians and senior officials to ‘play the Gretzky game’. The next few months will be dominated by Brexit and, hopefully, the replacement of the May/Hammond government. Those thinking about the post-May landscape and trying to figure out how to navigate in uncharted and turbulent waters should focus on one of the great lessons of politics that is weirdly hard for many MPs to internalise: the public rewards sustained focus on their priorities!
One of the lessons of the 2016 referendum (that many Conservative MPs remain desperate not to face) is the political significance of the NHS. The concept described above is one of those concepts in politics that maximises positive futures for the force that adopts it because it draws on multiple sources of strength. It combines, inter alia, all the political benefits of focus on the NHS, helping domestic technology companies, incentivising global investment, doing something that shows the world that Britain is (contra the May/Hammond outlook) open to science and high skilled immigrants, it is based on intrinsic advantages that Europe and America will find hard to overcome over a decade, it supplies (NB. MPs/spads) a never-ending string of heart-wrenching good news stories, and, very rarely in SW1, those pushing it would be seen as leading something of global importance. It will, therefore, obviously be rejected by a section of Conservative MPs who much prefer to live in a parallel world, who hate anything to do with science and who are ignorant about how new industries and wealth are really created. But for anybody trying to orient themselves to reality, connect themselves to sources of power, and thinking ‘how on earth could we clamber out of this horror show’, it is an obvious home run…
NB. It ought to go without saying that turning this idea into a political/government success requires focus on A) the NHS, health, science, NOT getting sidetracked into B) arguments about things like IQ and social mobility. Over time, the educated classes will continue to be dragged to more realistic views on (B) but this will be a complex process entangled with many hysterical episodes. (A) requires ruthless focus…
Please leave comments, fix errors below. I have not shown this blog in draft to Plomin or Hsu who obviously are not responsible for my errors.
Further reading
Plomin’s excellent new book, Blueprint. I would encourage journalists who want to understand this subject to speak to Plomin who works in London and is able to explain complex technical subjects to very confused arts graduates like me.
Post-Brexit Britain should be considering the intersection of 1) ARPA/PARC-style science research and ‘systems management’ for managing complex projects with 2) the reform of government institutions so that high performance teams — with different education/training (‘Tetlock processes’) and tools (including data science and visualisations of interactive models of complex systems) — can make ‘better decisions in a complex world’.
This paper examines the ARPA/PARC vision for computing and the nature of the two organisations. In the 1960s visionaries such as Joseph Licklider, Robert Taylor and Doug Engelbart developed a vision of networked interactive computing that provided the foundation not just for new technologies but for whole new industries. Licklider, Sutherland, Taylor et al provided a model (ARPA) for how science funding can work. Taylor provided a model (PARC) of how to manage a team of extremely talented people who turned a profound vision into reality. The original motivation for the vision of networked interactive computing was to help humans make good decisions in a complex world.
This story suggests ideas about how to make big improvements in the world with very few resources if they are structured right. From a British perspective it also suggests ideas about what post-Brexit Britain should do to help itself and the world and how it might be possible to force some sort of ‘phase transition’ on the rotten Westminster/Whitehall system.
Part II on the emergence of ‘systems management’, how George Mueller used it to put man on the moon, and a checklist of how successful management of complex projects is systematically different to how Whitehall works is HERE.
There was an excellent piece in the Telegraph yesterday by two young neuroscientists on how SW1 should be thinking about science post-Brexit. The byline says that James Phillips works at Janelia, a US lab that has explicitly tried to learn about how to fund science research from the famous successes of Bell Labs, the ARPA-PARC project that invented the internet and PC, and similar efforts. He must see every day how science funding can work so much better than is normal in Britain.
Today, the UK a) ties research up in appalling bureaucracy, such as requiring multi-stage procurement processes literally to change a lightbulb, and b) does not fund it enough. The bureaucracy around basic science is so crazy that a glitch in paper work means thousands of animals are secretly destroyed in ways the public would be appalled to learn if made public.
Few in SW1 take basic science research seriously. And in all the debates over Brexit, practically the entire focus is 1980s arguments over the mechanism for regulating product markets created by Delors to centralise power in Brussels — the Internal Market (aka Single Market). Thirty years after they committed to this mechanism and two years after the referendum that blew it up, most MPs still don’t understand what it is and how it works. Dismally, the last two years has been a sort of remedial education programme and there has been practically zero discussion about how Britain could help create the future.
During the referendum, Vote Leave argued that the dreadful Cameron/Osborne immigration policy (including the net migration target) was damaging and said we should make Britain MORE welcoming to scientists. Obviously Remain-SW1 likes to pretend that the May/Hammond Remain team’s shambles is the only possible version of Brexit. Nothing could be further from the truth. If the government had funded the NHS, ditched the ‘tens of thousands’ absurdity, and, for example, given maths, physics and computer science PhDs ‘free movement’ then things would be very different now — and Corbyn would probably be a historical footnote.
Regardless of how you voted in the referendum, reasonable people outside the rancid environment of SW1 should pressure their MPs to take their responsibilities to science x100 more seriously than they do.
I strongly urge you to read it all, send it to your MP, and politely ask for action…
(Their phrase ‘creating the future’ invokes Alan Kay’s famous line — the best way to predict the future is to invent it.)
Science holds the key, by James & Matthew Phillips
The 2008 crisis should have led us to reshape how our economy works. But a decade on, what has really changed? The public knows that the same attitude that got us into the previous economic crisis will not bring us long-term prosperity, yet there is little vision from our leaders of what the future should look like. Our politicians are sleeping, yet have no dreams. To solve this, we must change emphasis from creating “growth” to creating the future: the former is an inevitable product of the latter.
Britain used to create the future, and we must return to this role by turning to scientists and engineers. Science defined the last century by creating new industries. It will define this century too: robotics, clean energy, artificial intelligence, cures for disease and other unexpected advances lie in wait. The country that gives birth to these industries will lead the world, and yet we seem incapable of action.
So how can we create new industries quickly? A clue lies in a small number of institutes that produced a strikingly large number of key advances. Bell Labs produced much of the technology underlying computing. The Palo Alto Research Centre did the same for the internet. There are simple rules of thumb about how great science arises, embodied in such institutes. They provided ambitious long-term funding to scientists, avoided unnecessary bureaucracy and chased high-risk, high-reward projects.
Today, scientists spend much of their time completing paperwork. A culture of endless accountability has arisen out of a fear of misspending a single pound. We’ve seen examples of routine purchases of LEDs that cost under £10 having to go through a nine-step bureaucratic review process.
Scientists on the cusp of great breakthroughs can be slowed by years mired in review boards and waiting on a decision from on high. Their discoveries are thus made, and capitalised on, elsewhere. We waste money, miss patents, lose cures and drive talented scientists away to high-paid jobs. You don’t cure cancer with paperwork. Rather than invigilate every single decision, we should do spot checks retrospectively, as is done with tax returns.
A similar risk aversion is present in the science funding process. Many scientists are forced to specify years in advance what they intend to do, and spend their time continually applying for very short, small grants. However, it is the unexpected, the failures and the accidental, which are the inevitable cost and source of fruit in the scientific pursuit. It takes time, it takes long-term thinking, it takes flexibility. Peter Higgs, Nobel laureate who predicted the Higgs Boson, says he wouldn’t stand a chance of being funded today for lack of a track record. This leads scientists collectively to pursue incremental, low-risk, low-payoff work.
The current funding system is also top-down, prescriptive and homogenous, administered centrally from London. It is slow to respond to change and cut off from the real world.
We should return to funding university departments more directly, allowing more rapid, situation-aware decision-making of the kind present in start-ups, and create a diversity of funding systems. This is how the best research facilities in history operated, yet we do not learn their key lesson: that science cannot be managed by central edict, but flourishes through independent inquiry.
While Britain built much of modern science, today it neglects it, lagging behind other comparable nations in funding, and instead prioritising a financial industry prone to blowing up. Consider that we spent more money bailing out the banks in a single year than we have on science in the entirety of history.
We scarcely pause to consider the difference in return on investment. Rather than prop up old industries, we should invest in world-leading research institutes with a specific emphasis on high-risk, high-payoff research.
Those who say this is not government’s role fail the test of history. Much great science has come from government investment in times of crisis. Without Nasa, there would be no SpaceX. These government investments were used to provide a long-term, transformative vision on a scale that cannot be achieved through private investment alone – especially where there is a high risk of failure but high reward in success. The payoff of previous investments was enormous, so why not replicate the defence funding agencies that led to them with peacetime civilian equivalents?
In order to be the nation where new discoveries are made, we must take decisive steps to make the UK a magnet for talented young scientists.
However, a recent report on ensuring a successful UK research endeavour scarcely mentioned young scientists at all. An increased focus on this goal, alongside simple steps like long-term funding and guaranteed work visas for their spouses, would go a long way. In short, we should be to scientific innovation what we are to finance: a highly connected nerve centre for the global economy.
The political candidate that can leverage a pro-science platform to combine economic stimulus with the reality of economic pragmatism will transform the UK. We should lead the future by creating it.
James Phillips is a PhD student in neuroscience at the HHMI Janelia Research Campus in the US and the University of Cambridge. Matthew Phillips is a PhD student in neuroscience at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, University College London
UPDATE
Alan Kay, the brilliant researcher I mentioned above, happened to read this blog and posted this comment which I will also paste below here…
[From Alan Kay]
Good advice! However, I’m afraid that currently in the US there is nothing like the fabled Bell Labs or ARPA-PARC funding, at least in computing where I’m most aware of what is and is not happening (I’m the “Alan Kay” of the famous quote).
It is possible that things were still better a few years ago in the US than in the UK (I live in London half the year and in Los Angeles the other half). But I have some reasons to doubt. Since the new “president”, the US does not even have a science advisor, nor is there any sign of desire for one.
A visit to the classic Bell Labs of its heyday would reveal many things. One of the simplest was a sign posted randomly around: “Either do something very useful, or very beautiful”. Funders today won’t fund the second at all, and are afraid to fund at the risk level needed for the first.
It is difficult to sum up ARPA-PARC, but one interesting perspective on this kind of funding was that it was both long range and stratospherically visionary, and part of the vision was that good results included “better problems” (i.e. “problem finding” was highly valued and funded well) and good results included “good people” (i.e. long range funding should also create the next generations of researchers). in fact, virtually all of the researchers at Xerox PARC had their degrees funded by ARPA, they were “research results” who were able to get better research results.
Since the “D” was put on ARPA in the early 70s, it was then not able to do what it did in the 60s. NSF in the US never did this kind of funding. I spent quite a lot of time on some of the NSF Advisory Boards and it was pretty much impossible to bridge the gap between what was actually needed and the difficulties the Foundation has with congressional oversight (and some of the stipulations of their mission).
Bob Noyce (one of the founders of Intel) used to say “Wealth is created by Scientists, Engineers and Artists, everyone else just moves it around”.
Einstein said “We cannot solve important problems of the world using the same level of thinking we used to create them”.
A nice phrase by Vi Hart is “We must insure human wisdom exceeds human power”.
To make it to the 22nd century at all, and especially in better shape than we are now, we need to heed all three of these sayings, and support them as the civilization we are sometimes trying to become. It’s the only context in which “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” makes any useful sense.
‘Just like all British governments, they will act more or less in a hand to mouth way on the spur of the moment, but they will not think out and adopt a steady policy.’ Earl Cromer, 1896.
‘Fascinating that the same problems recur time after time, in almost every program, and that the management of the program, whether it happened to be government or industry, continues to avoid reality.’ George Mueller, pioneer of systems management and head of the Apollo programme to put man on the moon.
Traditional cultures, those that all humans lived in until quite recently and which still survive in pockets, don’t realise that they are living inside a particular perspective. They think that what they see is ‘reality’. It is, obviously, not their fault. It is not because they are stupid. It is a historical accident that they did/do not have access to mental models that help more accurate thinking about reality.
Westminster and the other political cultures dotted around the world are similar to these traditional cultures. They think they they are living in ‘reality’. The MPs and pundits get up, read each other, tweet at each other, give speeches, send press releases, have dinner, attack, fuck or fight each other, do the same tomorrow and think ‘this is reality’. Like traditional cultures they are wrong. They are living inside a particular perspective that enormously distorts reality.
They are trapped in thinking about today and their careers. They are trapped in thinking about incremental improvements. Almost nobody has ever been part of a high performance team responsible for a complex project. The speciality is a hot take to explain post facto what one cannot predict. They mostly don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t understand the decentralised information processing that allows markets to enable complex coordination. They don’t understand how scientific research works and they don’t value it. Their daily activity is massively constrained by the party and state bureaucracies that incentivise behaviour very different to what humanity needs to create long-term value. As Michael Nielsen (author of Reinventing Science) writes:
‘[M]uch of our intellectual elite who think they have “the solutions” have actually cut themselves off from understanding the basis for much of the most important human progress.’
Unlike traditional cultures, our modern political cultures don’t have the excuse of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. We could do better. But it is very very hard to escape the core imperatives that make big bureaucracies — public companies as well as state bureaucracies — so bad at learning. Warren Buffet explained decades ago how institutions actively fight against learning and fight to stay in a closed and vicious feedback loop:
‘My most surprising discovery: the overwhelming importance in business of an unseen force that we might call “the institutional imperative”. In business school, I was given no hint of the imperative’s existence and I did not intuitively understand it when I entered the business world. I thought then that decent, intelligence, and experienced managers would automatically make rational business decisions. But I learned the hard way that isn’t so. Instead rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play.
‘For example, 1) As if governed by Newton’s First Law, any institution will resist any change in its current direction. 2) … Corporate projects will materialise to soak up available funds. 3) Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will quickly be supported by … his troops. 4) The behaviour of peer companies … will be mindlessly imitated.’
Almost nobody really learns from the world’s most successful investor about investing and how to run a successful business with good corporate governance. (People read what he writes but almost no investors choose to operate long-term like him, I think it is still true that not a single public company has copied his innovations with corporate governance like ‘no pay for company directors’, and governments have consistently rejected his and Munger’s advice about controlling the looting of public companies by management.) Almost nobody really learns how to do things better from the experience of dealing with this ‘institutional imperative’. We fail over and over again in the same way, trusting in institutions that are programmed to fail.
It is very very hard for humans to lift our eyes from today and to go out into the future and think about what could be done to bring the future back to the present. Like ants crawling around on the leaf, we political people only know our leaf.
Science has shown us a different way. Newton looked up from his leaf, looked far away from today, and created a new perspective — a new model of reality. It took an extreme genius to discover something like calculus but once discovered billions of people who are far from being geniuses can use this new perspective. Science advances by turning new ideas into standard ideas so each generation builds on the last.
Politics does the equivalent of constantly trying to reinvent children’s arithmetic and botching it. It does not build reliable foundations of knowledge. Archimedes is no longer cutting edge. Thucydides and Sun Tzu are still cutting edge. Even though Tetlock and others have shown how to start making similar progress with politics, our political cultures fiercely resist learning and fight ferociously to stay in closed and failing feedback loops.
In many ways our political culture has regressed as it has become more and more audio-visual and less and less literate. (Only 31% of US college graduates can read at a basic level. I’d guess it’s similar here. See end.) I’ve experimented with the way Jeff Bezos runs meetings at Amazon: i.e start the meeting with giving people a 5-10 page memo to read. Impossible in Westminster, nobody will sit and read like that! Officials have tried and failed for a year to get senior ministers to engage with complex written material about the EU negotiations. TV news dominates politics and is extremely low-bandwidth: it contains a few hundred words and rarely uses graphics properly. Evan Davis illustrates a comment about ‘going down the plughole’ with a picture of water down a plughole and Nick Robinson illustrates a comment about ‘the economy taking off’ with a picture of a plane taking off. The constant flow of bullshit from the likes of Robert Peston and Jon Snow dominates the medium because competition has been impossible until recently. BUT, although technology is making these charlatans less relevant (good) it also creates new problems and will not necessarily improve the culture.
Today, the anniversary of the referendum, is a good day to forget the babble in the bubble and think about lessons from another project that changed the world, the famous ARPA/PARC team of the 1960s and 1970s.
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ARPA/PARC and ‘capturing the heavens’: The best way to predict the future is to invent it
The panic over Sputnik brought many good things such as a huge increase in science funding. America also created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, which later added ‘Defense’ and became DARPA). Its job was to fund high risk / high payoff technology development. In the 1960s and 1970s, a combination of unusual people and unusually wise funding from ARPA created a community that in turn invented the internet, or ‘the intergalactic network’ as Licklider originally called it, and the personal computer. One of the elements of this community was PARC, a research centre working for Xerox. As Bill Gates said, he and Steve Jobs essentially broke into PARC, stole their ideas, and created Microsoft and Apple.
The ARPA/PARC project has created over 35 TRILLION DOLLARS of value for society and counting.
The whole story is fascinating in many ways. I won’t go into the technological aspects. I just want to say something about the process.
What does a process that produces ideas that change the world look like?
One of the central figures was Alan Kay. One of the most interesting things about the project is that not only has almost nobody tried to repeat this sort of research but the business world has even gone out of its way to spread mis-information about it because it was seen as so threatening to business-as-usual.
I will sketch a few lessons from one of Kay’s pieces but I urge you to read the whole thing.
‘This is what I call “The power of the context” or “Point of view is worth 80 IQ points”. Science and engineering themselves are famous examples, but there are even more striking processes within these large disciplines. One of the greatest works of art from that fruitful period of ARPA/PARC research in the 60s and 70s was the almost invisible context and community that catalysed so many researchers to be incredibly better dreamers and thinkers. That it was a great work of art is confirmed by the world-changing results that appeared so swiftly, and almost easily. That it was almost invisible, in spite of its tremendous success, is revealed by the disheartening fact today that, as far as I’m aware, no governments and no companies do edge-of-the-art research using these principles.’
‘[W]hen I think of ARPA/PARC, I think first of good will, even before brilliant people… Good will and great interest in graduate students as “world-class researchers who didn’t have PhDs yet” was the general rule across the ARPA community.
‘[I]t is no exaggeration to say that ARPA/PARC had “visions rather than goals” and “funded people, not projects”. The vision was “interactive computing as a complementary intellectual partner for people pervasively networked world-wide”. By not trying to derive specific goals from this at the funding side, ARPA/PARC was able to fund rather different and sometimes opposing points of view.
‘The pursuit of Art always sets off plans and goals, but plans and goals don’t always give rise to Art. If “visions not goals” opens the heavens, it is important to find artistic people to conceive the projects.
‘Thus the “people not projects” principle was the other cornerstone of ARPA/PARC’s success. Because of the normal distribution of talents and drive in the world, a depressingly large percentage of organizational processes have been designed to deal with people of moderate ability, motivation, and trust. We can easily see this in most walks of life today, but also astoundingly in corporate, university, and government research. ARPA/PARC had two main thresholds: self-motivation and ability. They cultivated people who “had to do, paid or not” and “whose doings were likely to be highly interesting and important”. Thus conventional oversight was not only not needed, but was not really possible. “Peer review” wasn’t easily done even with actual peers. The situation was “out of control”, yet extremely productive and not at all anarchic.
‘”Out of control” because artists have to do what they have to do. “Extremely productive” because a great vision acts like a magnetic field from the future that aligns all the little iron particle artists to point to “North” without having to see it. They then make their own paths to the future. Xerox often was shocked at the PARC process and declared it out of control, but they didn’t understand that the context was so powerful and compelling and the good will so abundant, that the artists worked happily at their version of the vision. The results were an enormous collection of breakthroughs.
‘Our game is more like art and sports than accounting, in that high percentages of failure are quite OK as long as enough larger processes succeed… [I]n most processes today — and sadly in most important areas of technology research — the administrators seem to prefer to be completely in control of mediocre processes to being “out of control” with superproductive processes. They are trying to “avoid failure” rather than trying to “capture the heavens”.
‘All of these principles came together a little over 30 years ago to eventually give rise to 1500 Altos, Ethernetworked to: each other, Laserprinters, file servers and the ARPAnet, distributed to many kinds of end-users to be heavily used in real situations. This anticipated the commercial availability of this genre by 10-15 years. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
‘[W]e should realize that many of the most important ARPA/PARC ideas haven’t yet been adopted by the mainstream. For example, it is amazing to me that most of Doug Engelbart’s big ideas about “augmenting the collective intelligence of groups working together” have still not taken hold in commercial systems. What looked like a real revolution twice for end-users, first with spreadsheets and then with Hypercard, didn’t evolve into what will be commonplace 25 years from now, even though it could have. Most things done by most people today are still “automating paper, records and film” rather than “simulating the future”. More discouraging is that most computing is still aimed at adults in business, and that aimed at nonbusiness and children is mainly for entertainment and apes the worst of television. We see almost no use in education of what is great and unique about computer modeling and computer thinking. These are not technological problems but a lack of perspective. Must we hope that the open-source software movements will put things right?
‘The ARPA/PARC history shows that a combination of vision, a modest amount of funding, with a felicitous context and process can almost magically give rise to new technologies that not only amplify civilization, but also produce tremendous wealth for the society. Isn’t it time to do this again by Reason, even with no Cold War to use as an excuse? How about helping children of the world grow up to think much better than most adults do today? This would truly create “The Power of the Context”.’
Note how this story runs contrary to how free market think tanks and pundits describe technological development. The impetus for most of this development came from government funding, not markets.
Also note that every attempt since the 1950s to copy ARPA and JASON (the semi-classified group that partly gave ARPA its direction) in the UK has been blocked by Whitehall. The latest attempt was in 2014 when the Cabinet Office swatted aside the idea. Hilariously its argument was ‘DARPA has had a lot of failures’ thus demonstrating extreme ignorance about the basic idea — the whole point is you must have failures and if you don’t have lots of failures then you are failing!
People later claimed that while PARC may have changed the world it never made any money for XEROX. This is ‘absolute bullshit’ (Kay). It made billions from the laser printer alone and overall Xerox made 250 times what they invested in PARC before they went bust. In 1983 they fired Bob Taylor, the manager of PARC and the guy who made it all happen.
‘They hated [Taylor] for the very reason that most companies hate people who are doing something different, because it makes middle and upper management extremely uncomfortable. The last thing they want to do is make trillions, they want to make a few millions in a comfortable way’ (Kay).
Someone finally listened to Kay recently. ‘YC Research’, the research arm of the world’s most successful (by far) technology incubator, is starting to fund people in this way. I am not aware of any similar UK projects though I know that a small network of people are thinking again about how something like this could be done here. If you can help them, take a risk and help them! Someone talk to science minister Jo Johnson but be prepared for the Treasury’s usual ignorant bullshit — ‘what are we buying for our money, and how can we put in place appropriate oversight and compliance?’ they will say!
Why is this relevant to the referendum?
As we ponder the future of the UK-EU relationship shaped amid the farce of modern Whitehall, we should think hard about the ARPA/PARC example: how a small group of people can make a huge breakthrough with little money but the right structure, the right ways of thinking, and the right motives.
Those of us outside the political system thinking ‘we know we can do so much better than this but HOW can we break through the bullshit?’ need to change our perspective and gain 80 IQ points.
This real picture is a metaphor for the political culture: ad hoc solutions that are either bad or don’t scale.
ARPA said ‘Let’s get rid of all the wires’. How do we ‘get rid of all the wires’ and build something different that breaks open the closed and failing political cultures? Winning the referendum was just one step that helps clear away dead wood but we now need to build new things.
The ARPA vision that aligned the artists ‘like little iron filings’ was:
‘Computers are destined to become interactive intellectual amplifiers for everyone in the world universally networked worldwide’ (Licklider).
We need a motivating vision aimed not at tomorrow but at changing the basic wiring of the whole system, a vision that can align ‘the little iron filings’, and then start building for the long-term.
I will go into what I think this vision could be and how to do it another day. I think it is possible to create something new that could scale very fast and enable us to do politics and government extremely differently, as different to today as the internet and PC were to the post-war mainframes. This would enable us to build huge long-term value for humanity in a relatively short time (less than 20 years). To create it we need a process as well suited to the goal as the ARPA/PARC project was and incorporating many of its principles.
We must try to escape the current system with its periodic meltdowns and international crises. These crises move 500-1,000 times faster than that of summer 1914. Our destructive potential is at least a million-fold greater than it was in 1914. Yet we have essentially the same hierarchical command-and-control decision-making systems in place now that could not even cope with 1914 technology and pace. We have dodged nuclear wars by fluke because individuals made snap judgements in minutes. Nobody who reads the history of these episodes can think that this is viable long-term, and we will soon have another wave of innovation to worry about with autonomous robots and genetic engineering. Technology gives us no option but to try to overcome evolved instincts like destroying out-group competitors.
Ironically, one of the very few people in politics who understood the sort of thinking needed was … Jean Monnet, the architect of the EEC/EU! Monnet understood how to step back from today and build institutions. He worked operationally to prepare the future:
‘If there was stiff competition round the centres of power, there was practically none in the area where I wanted to work – preparing the future.’
Monnet was one of the few people in modern politics who really deserve the label ‘genius’. The story of how he wangled the creation of his institutions through the daily chaos of post-war politics is a lesson to anybody who wants to get things done.
But the institutions he created are in many ways the opposite of what the world needs. Their core operating principle is perpetual centralisation of power in the hands of an all powerful bureaucracy (Commission) and Court (ECJ). Nothing that works well in the world works like this!
Thanks to the prominence of Farage the dominant story among educated people is that those who got us out of the EU want to take us back to the pre-1914 era of hostile competing nation states. Nothing could be further from the truth. The key people in Vote Leave wanted and want not just what is best for Britain but what is best for all humanity. We want more international cooperation, not less. The problem with the EU is not that it is about international cooperation but that it is so bad at it and actually undermines it.
Britain leaving forces those with power to ask: how can all European countries trade freely and cooperate without subscribing to Monnet’s bureaucratic centralism? This will help Europe in the long-term. To those who favour this bureaucratic centralism and uniformity, reflect on the different trajectories of Europe and China post-Renaissance. In Europe, regulatory competition (so Columbus could chase funding in Spain after rejection in Portugal) brought immense gains. In China, centrally directed uniformity led to centuries of stagnation. America’s model of competitive federalism created by the founding fathers has been a far more effective engine of civilisation, growth, and new knowledge than the Monnet-Delors Single Market model.
If Britain were to focus on science and education with huge resources and a new-found seriousness, then this regulatory diversity would help not just Britain but all Europe and the global science community. We could make Britain the best place in the world to be for those who can invent the future. Like Alan Kay and his colleagues, we could create whole new industries. We could call Jeff Bezos and say, ‘Ok Jeff, you want a permanent international manned moon base, let’s talk about who does what, but not with that old rocket technology.’ No country on earth funds science as well as we already know how it could be done — that is something for Britain to do that would create real long-term value for humanity, instead of the ‘punching above our weight’ and ‘special relationship’ bullshit that passes for strategy in London. How we change our domestic institutions is within our power and will have much much greater influence on our long-termfuture than whatever deal is botched together with Brussels. We have the resources. But can we break the system open? If we don’t then we’re likely to go down the path we were already going down inside the EU, like the deluded Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard claiming ‘I am big, it’s the pictures that got small.’
*
Vote Leave and ‘good will’
Although Vote Leave was enmeshed in a sort of collective lunacy we managed, barely, to fend it off from the inner working of the campaign. Much of my job (sadly) was just trying to maintain a cordon around the core team so they could deliver the campaign with as little disruption as possible. We managed this because among the core people we had great good will. The stories of the campaign focus on the lunacy, but the people who really made it work remember the goodwill.
A year ago tonight I was sitting alone in a room thinking ‘we’ve won, now…’ when the walls started rumbling. At first I couldn’t make it out then, as Tim Shipman tells the story in his definitive book on the campaign, I heard ‘Dom, Dom, DOM’ — the team had declared victory. I went next door…
Thanks to everybody who sacrificed something. As I said that night and as I said in my long blog on the campaign, I’ve been given credit I don’t deserve and which rightly belongs to others — Cleo Watson, Richard ‘Ricardo’ Howell, Brother Starkie, Oliver Lewis, Lord Suart et al. Now, let’s think about what should come next…
Watch Alan Kay explain how to invent the future HERE and HERE.
Ps. Kay also points out that the real computer revolution won’t happen until people fulfil the original vision of enabling children to use this powerful way of thinking:
‘The real printing revolution was a qualitative change in thought and argument that lagged the hardware inventions by almost two centuries. The special quality of computers is their ability to rapidly simulate arbitrary descriptions, and the real computer revolution won’t happen until children can learn to read, write, argue and think in this powerful new way. We should all try to make this happen much sooner than 200 or even 20 more years!’
Almost nobody in education policy is aware of the educational context for the ARPA/PARC project which also speaks volumes about the abysmal field of ‘education research/policy’.
* Re the US literacy statistic, cf. A First Look at the Literacy of America’s Adults in the 21st Century, National Assessment of Adult Literacy, U.S. Dept of Education, NCES 2006.
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