I’ve moved Alt Text to its new home. This post was originally published there prior to the 2020 election. Please join me there if you enjoy the content. Subscribers are always welcome too so you don’t miss my quarterly posts :)

No, liberals don't want to take your freedom and conservatives don't hate poor people*

I want to capture how I feel at this time in history. “This time in history” is a funny phrase. Every time is a time in history. Every thing is either experience or memory.

But I needed to get this out prior to next Tuesday’s election — the most important one in my lifetime. I think I’ve said that before. This time is truer than ever. We need to vote. And we need to vote for Joe Biden. This isn’t because he is amazing or anything. We all know he ain’t. Put simply, America may not be able to handle another four years like the ones we’ve just had.

This isn’t going to be a post about all the things wrong with Trump and the tone he has set for the country. That would take too long and others have done it better. Plus he shouldn’t get all the “credit”. He simply tapped into something that was already there.

No, I’d like to take this post down a more personal path — in an old school weblog sort of way. I’d like to tell you about what has made me very sad and very angry in 2020.

I’ve always thought Americans — when it really came down to it — would stand together — would rise up as one. (Some) Wars have done it. I figured huge events like an alien invasion or global pandemic would have the same sort of effect. Unfortunately, the Covid-19 pandemic has not brought Americans together, except for maybe in hospital beds near each other. We’ve had riots where some are angry and sad and some are out to sow chaos for their own gain. There are people proudly not wearing masks — disregarding the other people in our society for — you know — their freedom. And you have people getting together in large numbers, going to restaurants for — you know — boredom.

I really don’t like how my fellow Americans are behaving.

More than anything, I dislike how I feel during these times. What I am feeling borders on hate for those who would — in my opinion — put their party and “winning” over the good of the country, and even their neighbors.

I don’t like hating.

I want to try to understand people. I am not interested in how they may see things but how it is that they came to see things the way they do.

I would like to tear down the idea that we are our beliefs versus just believing what we believe. We should believe what we believe but be who we are. We should hold our beliefs as less sacred — be willing to change them when new information is presented. But today, we vote based on how we identify and which candidates best reflect that identity back at us.

This is why to say someone is voting against their best interests is simply not understanding how that person sees the world and their place within it. I won’t ask someone why they are seemingly voting against their interests ever again. Instead I’ll be curious about the person. I’ll want to know what motivates them? What is important to them? How do they see themselves, their community, their country.

We need to understand each other and for that we need to talk to each other. And here we get to the thing that has really got me down — especially in this time where we are (or should be) spending time more or less isolated with our families and small circles of friends. It is harder than ever to talk to those “on the other side”.

We need to move away from politics as team sports where one side “wins”, one side loses, and the sum is zero. It isn’t winning to simply make the other side angry, or sad. We should be looking for ways to have the highest number of Americans improve their lives.

My views on America both past and present have really been informed by this Wait But Why blog post series that I recommend everyone read even though it is uber long. Really, though, you should read it. It is great. Here’s a bit from the end:

Humans are complicated animals with complicated motivations, but the basic idea holds up. If a reasonably stable human society starts falling into some kind of downward spiral, it’s probably because something about one or both of the independent variables has changed — usually, something about the environment.

I’ve read a whole bunch of sociological theories about why we in the U.S. have been spiraling down a polarization vortex, and there are lots of interesting ideas, with little consensus.

The post goes on to point out that Americans are becoming segregated into geographic and information bubbles that make it tougher for us to come into contact with others holding different views, and when we do, it is more difficult to understand and empathize with them.

I think it can be easy to dismiss the geographic bubbles until you dive into the research of Thomas Schelling and corresponding simulation created by Vi Hart and Nicky Case.

Small individual bias can lead to large collective bias.

Equality is an unstable equilibrium. The smallest of bias can push a whole society past the tipping point.

The smallest biases that almost all of us have, for example, all it takes — even for those who desire to live in a diverse neighborhood — is a slight interest in not being in the minority (fiscally, racially, etc) of that neighborhood, to compel the whole neighborhood to segregate. Play with the simulations yourself to see how.

What’s even worse than slight preferences tipping us all into a segregated world, is that simply being unbiased isn’t enough to change it back. If there was ever bias present, people will need to take active measures like choosing to move into places where they are the minority to correct things. It won’t fix itself.

Then there are the information bubbles where we get our news from hyper-specific outlets catering to what we tend to click on, based on algorithms whose only purpose is to maximize our attention — get us that next video. This has lead to people going down rabbit holes and believing crazy things. Watching The Social Dilemma on Netflix and reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff really brings these points home.

The problem beneath all other problems

Technology’s promise to keep us connected has given rise to a host of unintended consequences that are catching up with us. If we can’t address our broken information ecosystem, we’ll never be able to address the challenges that plague humanity.

Persuasive design techniques like push notifications and the endless scroll of your newsfeed have created a feedback loop that keeps us glued to our devices.

Social media advertising gives anyone the opportunity to reach huge numbers of people with phenomenal ease, giving bad actors the tools to sow unrest and fuel political divisions.

Algorithms (and those who deploy them) promote content that sparks outrage, hate, and amplifies biases within the data that we feed them.

We need to have some shared understanding of the truth or we cannot function as a society. But as we are pulled and pushed into these “safe” information bubbles we only hear opinions from people who look and sound like us. We are living in different realities.

I’m going to be searching for people in these different realities in 2021 regardless of who wins next week’s election. I’ll just be a lot sadder and angrier for a while while I do it. Please cut me some slack.

No, liberals don’t want to take your freedom and conservatives don’t hate poor people* was originally published in alt text on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

These Sino-Japanese characters are Kai and Zen — Kaizen when used together–and mean improvement. When Toyota started to use the term as part of its underlying lean manufacturing principles, the common meaning bent towards the way the car maker was using it: continuous improvement. In combining ‘kai’ and ‘zen,’ each individual makes sacrifices for the betterment of the entire group. The cycle of kaizen activity as laid out in The Toyota Way (and popularized in the West by W. Edwards Deming) is:

Plan → Do → Check → Act.

When I “discovered” the symbols, I had believed just that they were beautiful to look at and elegantly illustrated a concept that appealed to me. It’s not only appropriate now, that I apply these symbols to my life — as I look to get more involved with charitable endeavors and work on myself — but it also ties into the application of agile methodologies that I’ve employed during the last 15 years of my career in software development and startups.

There are likely other ways to understand kaizen or live the philosophy of kaizen that could be beyond me.

One does not really ‘understand’ the cultural connotations of kaizen, but rather ‘feels’ and ‘senses’ its presence living in modern-day Japan. In Japan, an entity or product without kaizen is like a bowl of rice without miso soup–one simply flourishes by enhancing the other. [Source]

While I may never fully come to understand all that it means, I will likely still keep these two symbols in my various social media profiles as a small reminder to always be changing for the better.

改善 was originally published in alt text on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Editors Note: AltText.com has moved. Primarily this move was made because I felt it was important to “own” the content I was creating, but more importantly to have greater access to the readers of the site. I am doing this by adding a subscription option on the site. If you’ve enjoyed the writing here, please subscribe outside of Medium. You’ll get notified of new posts and there will be—at some point—something cool that subscribers will receive.

If you don’t want a child to cross a street you should yell “Stay on that side” versus “Don’t cross the street”. I don’t have children but that hasn’t stopped me from passing it on to all my parent-friends. It is just one of those things that has always stuck with me.

Telling children (and adults, too!) what you want them to do rather than what you don’t want them to do puts the focus on the desired action and ups your chances of a positive outcome. (Source)

Nadene van der Linden’s post on improving communication with kids provides some helpful tips:‌

Use more “dos” than “don’ts”

Some kids hear a lot of “don’ts.” Often parents know what they don’t want to happen, so they lead in with a “don’t” statement. The downside of “don’t” statements is that they fail to promote the positive behavior you want to see. If anything, they reinforce the behavior you don’t want.

Imagining talking to your child as you talk to your friends can help break the “don’t” habit. We would rarely say “don’t do this, don’t do that” to our friends when they come to visit. We instead use more open and respectful suggestions.

Swapping our “don’ts” for “dos” can look like this:

- “Don’t go outside, it’s cold,” becomes, “Stay inside, please. It’s too cold to play outside.”
- “Don’t hit your brother,” becomes, “Play gently with your brother.”
- “Don’t color on the carpet,” becomes, “Please do your coloring on the table.”

Several years ago, I started hearing and seeing more and more examples of positive and negative language in use. Here’s a recent (ridiculous) example from the apartment complex we lived in:‌

A quick inspection will show that the most prominent text on each of these refuse receptacles is to say what it isn’t. The green recycling bin on the left has two large signs warning no garage is to be placed there and a smaller white sign indicating it is single-stream recycling. Meanwhile, turning our attention to the right, the largest type on the sign shows “Recycle” but we are supposed to understand that the arrow points, not to the opening just to the left but instead to the green bin on the other side of it. Each bin is communicating most loudly what its use isn’t. At some point, they may have realized that the signs still were not working and placed an easel with even clearer instructions — you know — instead of just replacing all the signs on each bin with a large clear sign for what goes in each.

Not just for kids and garbage bins

You can easily see that the tips for communicating with kids can provide utility for adults as well. Simply tweaking language to convey gratitude versus apology changes the tenor of communication as well.

“Sorry I am late” becomes “Thank you for waiting for me”‌
‌”Don’t” becomes “I like it when…”

You might not even realize that you use common negative phrasing every day. I know I didn’t think I was until I examined some common expressions in use around the Edwards’ household.

Here are some examples from the post How to Turn 11 Everyday Phrases From Negative to Positive (slightly rearranged; emphasis mine):

Why not? → Sounds good‌
‌No problem → Definitely!‌
‌Can’t complain → Everything’s going well, thanks‌
‌‌
‌These phrases are meant to be positive — but the human brain has a negative bias, and subconsciously brings up all of the reasons not to do something, problems, or complains when processing these words.‌
‌‌
‌I’m exhausted → I need to rest‌
‌I forgot → I’ll make sure to set a reminder‌
‌‌
‌Flipping the phrase to include a solution leaves both the speaker and the listener with a better taste in their mouths.‌
‌‌
‌Constructive criticism → Feedback

How you ask for feedback can affect what type of feedback you receive. Ask for criticism (constructive or not) and that is what you will get.

Language structures reality and impacts the way we feel. “No, I can’t get it to you on Thursday,” feels differently than “What I can do is get it to you first thing on Friday morning.” They basically say the same thing but one sets an “I can” framework and the other an “I can’t.”

The Framing Effect

This has been studied, most famously perhaps, by cognitive and mathematical psychologist Amos Tversky and Nobel Memorial Prize-winner (Economic Sciences) Daniel Kahneman1.

Way back in 1981 Tversky and Kahneman set up an experiment where they asked hypothetical patients to choose one of two treatments for a hypothetical disease based on the descriptions below. The catch? Both predicted outcomes are the same, they just seem different based on the way they are framed.

72% chose Treatment A when it was positively framed compared to treatment B, while only 22% chose it when it was negatively framed.

Linguists believe individuals who follow the findings of Tversky’s and Kahneman’s experiment, and use positive verbalism like positively slanted speech, are generally perceived in a better light compared to those who do not. Through mindfulness of this type of diction, English speakers can elect to alter the reception of their message. This is because positive language affects cognition. (source)

That affecting cognition part is huge and it is largely described by something called the Pollyanna Principle — that humans are more inclined to remember pleasant things more accurately than unpleasant things. This happens at the subconscious level — and for anyone who’s self-examined — that’s who's calling the shots.

PositivePsychology.com describes this as:

the human tendency to focus on the positive and use more positive words and terms during a conversation. Generally, people who are mentally healthy and not suffering from depression tend to focus more on the positive than the negative, and they are prone to recalling more positive than negative phenomena from their memories as well.

According to researchers Matlin and Stang in the 1970s “cognitive processes selectively favor processing of pleasant over unpleasant information” and business consultant Sarah Simoneaux suggests that we actually comprehend positive statements 30–40% times faster than we would negative ones.

Our languages, to varying degrees, have even evolved a positivity bias into them. Researchers published a paper to this effect in 2015 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (you can figure out how to pronounce the acronym).

Human language reveals a universal positivity bias

‌By looking at the spread of 100,000 words in 10 different languages2 evidence is presented of “a deep imprint of human sociality in language” across three axis:

1. The words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias
2. The estimated emotional content of words is consistent between languages under translation
3. This positivity bias is strongly independent of the frequency of word use

Even when taking into account that one of the sources of study was that font of positivity known as Twitter, the results show that we generally are an optimistic species — at least those subsets of us that have survived until now.

Brief Aside

Like genes, ideas (or stories), need also be passed from generation to generation to survive. And like genes, the ideas that best allow the success of the organism, or the group — at a more macro level — are the ones that will get passed on the longest. PLUS there is an interplay at work between genes and ideas. One can actually confer success onto the other.

For example, for a story to have a long shelf life, its believers need to be super into passing down their genes, because stories are mostly passed down via generational indoctrination — they’re heritable. So stories that override reproductive instincts won’t fly. I’m sure there were tribes along the way who came to believe that sex was disgusting or that babies were demons or that severe child abuse was a virtue or that baby circumcision should include the testicles — beliefs that drove their genes right to extinction. (Source³)‌

But using positive messaging doesn’t just change the way others receive those messages (and thus, think). It changes the way the sender of those messages feels.

So when we use positive language…

• People do what we want
• We are perceived as better
• We feel better

The language we use affects how we perceive the world, how others perceive us, and how we perceive ourselves. It can be used as a tool for us to live in a better place. It will actually be better for us — since the world is only what we perceive it to be.

‌Since I know many people have a tough time with this positivity-thing. I thought I would complete this post by leaving this video here in hope that it just might perk them up.⁴

1. You’ll See Kahneman’s name in a future post or two as well. Read his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”.
2. Languages (sorted from most to least positive): Spanish, Portuguese, English, Indonesian, French, German, Arabic, Russian, Korean, Chinese
3. I’ll frequently find a way to work in a post from Tim Urban and his work at Wait But Why
4. Likewise, I hope to never miss always find an opportunity to post a video from Kurzgesagt.

‌

The language of positivity was originally published in alt text on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

tl;dr — I’ve migrated this site away from Medium.com to a shared server running an install of Ghost. There were several reasons for this but chief among them was a growing sense of disconnection with the readers of the site and a desire to create a community again.

Please join me there (it will feel quite familiar) and subscribe to ensure you are a part of this community we are growing.

🌰🥜 and 🔩🔩

Despite being a bit behind the curve when I migrated this site and its contents to Medium.com a few years ago, it felt like the right thing to do. The work involved with maintaining the site’s infrastructure, my disillusionment with Wordpress as a writing platform and corresponding enchantment with the writing experience on Medium all played a part. But underlying it all was a belief that I could share my content with more people on Medium than I could on my own. I knew that would come at a cost but at the time it was one I felt glad to pay.

Back in 2017, I got in just in time to utilize my own domain — something that Medium subsequently shut down but would have been a deal breaker for me had I had to use medium.com/alttext versus alttext.com. What they also did, however, was to start switching over, more and more, to a membership model. I paid — it wasn’t much — and I believing in what the leadership at Medium was trying to do. Not only did I move Alt Text to Medium but I spearheaded the move of the Misty Robotics blog as well. Medium seemed like a great content discovery and consumption solution and it also happened to be a pleasure to create content there.

Experiencing Medium as a reader

At some point, however, more by laziness than anything, I let my membership lapse and I was confronted with how the Medium community felt to a non member. It felt exclusive but not in a way that I wanted it to. All of a sudden I wondered how much of that was apparent to readers. I didn’t want some people left out. I always made sure my content settings allowed anyone to read posts on Alt Text. But what I don’t know is how that affected my posts being recommended or otherwise served up to Medium readers. (I suspect it did not help)

The costs of hosting Alt Text on Medium now started to outweigh the benefits. Sure I am a very sporadic writer and I probably did get a bit of a lift in terms of readership. But the cost of that was that I don’t feel like I have a relationship with those readers. Even now, I don’t really have a good way to tell all those who subscribed to Alt Text on Medium that I have moved; that I would love for them to subscribe again, to this new form. Because the largest reason for the move was a growing sense of being disconnected to the community I really wanted to build.

Ghost made this possible

Though this move has really been facilitated by the creation of Ghost. The editor in Ghost is essentially the experience of drafting and publishing on Medium. There are a few places where it isn’t as polished but that is more than made up for by the fact that it is in continuous development and you can embed HTML into a post. They even have a discourse community forum where I can gripe :)

I’ve still got to work on my local development environment (I’m a bit rusty in that department and I was never super knowledgeable in dev ops/sys ops to begin with) that will allow me to make some more significant changes to the template.

What’s next for Alt Text?

As with all plans, this is subject to change but moving back to a more independent platform should allow for a few things I have been meaning to do more of here at Alt Text.

• More posts. Yeah, I know I have said this before, but I feel a pretty strong sense of purpose here. I would like to connect with people through what I write here and so I plan on keeping a better cadence of posts — you know, like more frequent than annually but perhaps assuredly not weekly.
• A redesign. That’s right, one of the itches I’ve really wanted to scratch in the pst few years is getting back to some design and UX work in my spare time. This site has often given me this opportunity and now, outside of Medium, I’ll be able to do that again. Though you may notice that this default them provided by Ghost is very similar to what Alt Text looked like on Medium, you should start to see subtle tweaks here and there prior to a new look.
• Different content types. Another think I miss from the heydays of Alt Text (see screenshot below) is the ability to mix in some different content in addition to longer form posts. Small asides, movie and tv reviews, etc. Sometimes I just want to post a quick thought–why should those be restricted to Twitter?
• Subscriber perks. I’m not sure about this one but aside from getting new content from Alt Text sent to their inbox, I am wondering if there is something else I can do for those that choose to subscribe. If I can figure out the technical challenges, maybe something as simple as commenting on posts is only open to subscribers, or maybe there is an area only for subscribers. Still needs more thought but I do want to encourage a community here — since that is what I have been doing in my career for the last dozen or so years. So hey, why not subscribe.

• Subscriber perks. I’m not sure about this one but aside from getting new content from Alt Text sent to their inbox, I am wondering if there is something else I can do for those that choose to subscribe. If I can figure out the technical challenges, maybe something as simple as commenting on posts is only open to subscribers, or maybe there is an area only for subscribers. Still needs more thought but I do want to encourage a community here — since that is what I have been doing in my career for the last dozen or so years. So hey, why not subscribe.

1. For those of you who have followed Alt Text all these decades, you know it will be a low volume newsletter list to sign up for.

Alt Text is back on its own was originally published in alt text on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Editor’s Note: I guess when working at a startup I only make time to write once per year — at the end when everyone has time off. I guess this is that annual post, and something on which I need to work.

Just over a year ago now I wrote about the importance of maintaining a balance between work and life when working at a startup.

My life with Jena is too important to slip into old patterns — to prioritize work ahead of us. I’ll need to take time off. Not just vacation, but evenings and weekends. That can be hard at a startup. It will just take awareness, discipline, and good habits. It will take growth — growth of a different kind.

A year go, I thought it would take awareness, discipline, and good habits to take control of my life and to maintain balance while working for a startup again. Increasingly, however, I am learning it will actually take complete change of perspective. A new way of conceiving of myself.

Introspection has never been something that has come naturally to me and I’ll write more about this in 2020, but over the past three years, I have come to know myself much better. I’ve been inspired by a confluence of sources as I have begun to look more inward these past few years:

• Time way from work, after SmartThings
• Author, Sam Harris’ book/app, Waking Up and podcasts, many of which deal with consciousness and meditation
• Working with and growing with the extremely generous and open leadership team at Misty Robotics

But largely it was a growing realization that I should be curious about myself—that there were parts of me that needed to be examined, understood, and hopefully improved.

Part of what I have come to understand is that I am not my work. (I am also not my thoughts, but that is also a post for another time). I have to remind myself of this often, but I know my value is not derived from what I do.

“Your value comes from who you are, not from what you do.”

When a great friend, recently sent me, Chop Wood, Carry Water: How to Fall In Love With the Process of Becoming Great by Joshua Medcalf, these ideas—these recent realizations—were reinforced and illuminated in a new way. That last quote above, and those below are from this book.

“It is easy to feel like your value is much greater when your teams win, when you make a lot of money, when you experience great success in business. But it is just as easy to feel defeated and depressed when your teams aren’t winning, when your business is failing, and when it feels like you are failing at everything”

Is my value equivalent to the success of the businesses I’ve started? Does the success of this little robot I am working on now change who I am as a person?

No.

“The truth is that your value is constant, it is priceless, and it never truly goes up or down based off of results or your performance”

And that is the same for everyone. Companies — especially startups come and go. Whether I am designing an app, executing a marketing plan, leading product development, or operating as CEO—when that role changes, my value does not.

“Find your identity in something that cannot simply be stripped away in a moment, and do the hard work of reminding yourself that your value comes from who you are.”

Think about it. You can lose your job in an instant. Can you lose who you are in that time? No. But if how you see yourself is so tightly wound with what role you are in, it might feel that way. Now I haven’t figured all of this out yet. I still put too much of myself into my work. But I am learning. And I am looking to the future.

As 2019 comes to a close, people everywhere will be contemplating their goals for the new year. I won’t be. Other people or outside forces can stop me from reaching goals. I’ll be looking for a mission for the rest of my life. When I find it, no one will be able to stop me from living it.¹

1. Don’t worry. I’ll write a post about it too.

Growth of a different kind was originally published in alt text on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Startup is an interesting word. They used to just be called small businesses. But of course, startups aren’t meant to remain small. They are meant to grow, and usually, grow rapidly. Maybe they should be call growups.

If I’m being honest, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to get back into a startup after SmartThings. The last few years really burned me out and it wasn’t all Samsung’s fault. There were lots and lots of little self-inflicted wounds we gave ourselves along the way. I was enjoying time off and travel. I got cats, read, blogged (a bit); helped start a non-profit based on effective giving, moved to the Pacific Northwest (sort of). I wasn’t bored.

I had even been helping a friend or two with some startups of their own — doing brand and design work, strategic planning, even a bit of front-end development. It was fun.

So when I agreed to speak with Tim Enwall, Misty Robotics’ CEO, it really was as an advisor to what they were attempting to start. But as I learned of Misty’s products, mission, and team, the more I discovered overlapping interests and experiences that I could bring to bear to an exciting opportunity. In fact, it seemed like the role was tailored specifically to those interests and experiences.

But still, the idea of rejoining a startup wasn’t wholly appealing. I had a lot of questions. They were mostly about myself. Could I have a sense of ownership in an organization I hadn't started? Had my abilities atrophied from several years of disuse? Would I have sufficient motivation to participate fully in this type of endeavor again? Could I maintain a sense of balance between the life I now felt protective of and the demands an early stage company would place on my time and attention?

Now a year into this new adventure, I have answers to these questions. Yes. No. Yes. No.

Well, three out of four ain’t bad, as they say. But I’ll need to make adjustments on that last one if I’d like to enjoy any sort of longevity at Misty (or any other effort I undertake). My life with Jena is too important to slip into old patterns — to prioritize work ahead of us. I’ll need to take time off. Not just vacation, but evenings and weekends. That can be hard at a startup. It will just take awareness, discipline, and good habits. It will take growth—growth of a different kind.

Starting a business isn’t hard was originally published in alt text on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today, I join the team at Misty Robotics—a team with an audacious goal: to put a robot in every home and office. That’s a lot of robots. And before we can get there, robots will have to prove their value in societies, companies, and families.

Plenty of robots are already in our homes and offices. We use them every day. Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and yes, even Bixby are examples of headless robots that you can speak with and of which you can ask questions. We’ve had Roomba vacuuming our floors and we’ve got drones that follow us and take our pictures. There are sightings of telepresence robots, robo-security guards, and autonomous greeters and tour guides patrolling silicon valley offices, malls, stores, and real estate. There will be a robot carrying the torch at the next year’s Winter Olympics. Saudi Arabia is learning there are consequences for robot-related publicity stunts:

Can on Twitter

You know what's crazy Saudi Arabia gave citizenship to the first woman robot, Sophia is allowed to do more things than the real women in that country. There's something very wrong with that

So of course…the robot to which they “granted citizenship” is now advocating for more rights for the real women of Saudi Arabia.¹

And, of course, we all know robots are coming for our jobs and our cats, apparently. Robots are here.

The problem: Rosie is not.

Our current crop of robots are fairly one-dimensional. Some can answer simple questions. Some can vacuum your rug. Some can take your picture, but none spark our imagination. None bring about visions of the future we saw way back in the 1960’s with The Jetsons. 1960s*.

That’s where Misty comes in. If we don’t want homes full of single-function robots zooming and whizzing around, we need to create robots that can do more. We need robots that can multi-task. That can prove their worth as a valued member of the family. A personal robot.

To do this, a lot of work will be required—sparks of innovation will fly. But the timing is nearly right. And we’ve got a good team—spiritually led by founder and Head of Product, Ian Bernstein, who has been building robots since his early days. He wants our robots to be something more and describes Building The Imperfect Beast, like this:

Like in all relationships, everyone has their quirks that make them unique. Their style, mannerisms, and vibe. Robots should be no different if we wish to make them feel more like a being than an object.

Founder and Head of Company, Tim Enwall recently described the following strategy when he laid out Misty’s Ten Year Plan:

Make the very best multi-purpose robots available to programmers and makers (a.k.a. dreamers, inventors, creators) and enable them over time to add tens of thousands of skills to make them eventually useful to office and home consumers.

This is the commitment to ecosystem creation and advocacy that we had in the early days of SmartThings and what truly set us apart. It is my aim to amplify this strategy with Misty and partner with external robotics enthusiasts and developers curious about robots to enable the era of the home robot—the personal robot—the era of Rosie.

Endnotes:

1. This will be the last time you’ll see me link to anything about Sophia. Really the only thing intelligent about her is the promotional skills being brought to bear schilling for this artificial “intelligence”.

The long and winding road that leads to a robot in every home and office was originally published in alt text on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Author’s note: Because this issue is so crucial to our lives, I’ve broken the original post down into these six topics—each in their own post to allow for easier reading. Feel free to jump around.

1. An introduction to the opportunities and threats we face as we 
   near the realization of human-level artificial intelligence 
2. What do we mean by intelligence, artificial or otherwise? 
3. The how, when, and what of AI
4. AI and the bright future ahead
5. AI and the bleak, darkness that could befall us
6. What should we be doing about AI anyway? (this post)

While it may be true that we are inventing our replacements in so many of life’s activities we need to ensure that things don’t go off the rails and we create the bringers of our own demise. There are researchers, philosophers, computer scientists, and others working on the problem of artificial intelligence goal alignment and safety right now, and it will be a growing field. But, what can laypeople do to help ensure that when AI is developed it is done safely? I think the activities that will have the biggest impact can be broadly grouped into these activities: learning more, discussing with others, supporting the effort, and then, for a few, directing your careers and other efforts directly.

Learn more

If you’re inspired to learn more, I heartily encourage you. To get started, here are a few sources that have inspired me:

• This pair of 2015 blog posts by Tim Urban at Wait But Why: The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence and The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction.
• Max Tegmark’s 2017 book: Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
• Listen to the Sam Harris podcast The Future of Intelligence (with Max Tegmark) or watch his TED Talk titled Can we build AI without losing control over it?
• The “classic futurist’s bible” The Age of the Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil
• Follow along with news of AI on The Future of Life Institute’s blog
• Learn more about AI Safety at OpenAI

Discuss with family and friends

Chances are, if you’ve just read these posts, you are now more informed on AI and AI safety issues than nearly anyone you know or are likely to meet for a while. Normal people simply don’t spend time on this.

Max Tegmark asks these 7 questions at the beginning of Chapter 5 in Life 3.0. While interesting in their own right, these questions serve as great jumping off points for conversations. I encourage you to have those conversations, both here on this site in the comments and back in your own lives.

1. Do you want there to be superintelligence?
2. Do you want humans to still exist, be replaced, cyborgized, and/or uploaded/simulated?
3. Do you want humans or machines in control?
4. Do you want AIs to be conscious or not?
5. Do you want to maximize positive experiences, minimize suffering, or leave this to sort itself out?
6. Do you want life spreading into the cosmos?
7. Do you want a civilization striving toward a greater purpose that you sympathize with, or are you OK with future life forms that appear content even if you view their goals as pointlessly banal?

You can take a survey featuring some of these concepts (and more) and see the results at the Future of Life website. Just take care on the twelve aftermath scenarios. Example: I thought the Egalitarian Utopia sounded good but it isn’t clear just from the survey that it represents a repressing of any superintelligent AI development (to which I am opposed).

For my part, I am already planning on breaking this immense and important subject down further in future posts. If you have concepts, ideas, questions, etc, on things you would like to see me research and write about, feel free to mention it in the comments or reach out to me directly.

Support AI safety efforts

Not everyone is an AI researcher but nearly everyone can support their work. There are numerous researches engaged in important work.

In spring of 2015, FLI launched our AI Safety Research program, funded primarily by a generous donation from Elon Musk. By fall of that year, 37 researchers and institutions had received over $2 million in funding to begin various projects that will help ensure artificial intelligence will remain safe and beneficial.

Here’s a small list with the funds they have sought.

There are several prominent non-profits that could make use of your generosity. Among them are:

The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), which focuses on mathematics research that is unlikely to be produced by academics, trying to build the foundations for the development of safe AIs.

The Future of Humanity Institute—a mature, well-established research institute, affiliated with Oxford and led by Nick Bostrom (author of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies).

OpenAI — Started by some tech heavyweights including Elon Musk, of Tesla /SpaceX/Neuralink/etc, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman; PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and more with a mission is to build safe AGI, and ensure AGI’s benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible. They even include a suite of software tools to help with that effort.

If you have trouble deciding, the Open Philanthropy Project is attempting to determine which groups are most effective. With this type of research, however, it may be hard to determine each groups impact for some time.

Get involved directly

Donations not your thing? Want to get your hands dirty? Well, are you a computer programmer? Are you tasked with writing programs that analyze a bunch of data? Are you working on algorithms or machine learning to make this easier? You are are the forefront of the efforts to create artificial intelligence, even if you don’t think you are. You can use some of OpenAI’s tools to aid in testing and even pledge to create only ethical technologies.

Not yet an engineer? Consider getting a PhD in Computer Science.

You can support AI safety with your activism and civic duties—support organizations and candidates who demonstrate an understanding of the risks and a willingness to advocate, negotiate, and legislate to bring AI about in a safe way and perhaps not these ones trying to fight any regulation.

If you can’t beat them…

Want to get on our robot overlords’ good side? You could join the Way of the Future church, who’s mission is to create a peaceful and respectful transition of who is in charge of the planet from people to people + “machines”.

Other parts in this series (in case you missed them):

Part One: An introduction to the opportunities and threats we face as we near the realization of human-level artificial intelligence
Part Two: What do we mean by intelligence, artificial or otherwise?
Part Three: The how, when, and what of AI
Part Four AI and the bright future ahead
Part Five: AI and the bleak, darkness that could befall us

This is such an immense topic that I ended up digressing to explain things in greater detail or to provide additional examples and these bogged the post down. There are still some important things I wanted to share, so I have included those in a separate endnotes post.

What should we be doing about artificial intelligence safety anyway? was originally published in alt text on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race….It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”

— Stephen Hawking

Author’s note: Because this issue is so crucial to our lives, I’ve broken the original post down into these six topics—each in their own post to allow for easier reading. Feel free to jump around.

1. An introduction to the opportunities and threats we face as we 
   near the realization of human-level artificial intelligence 
2. What do we mean by intelligence, artificial or otherwise? 
3. The how, when, and what of AI
4. AI and the bright future ahead
5. AI and the bleak, darkness that could befall us (this post)
6. What should we be doing about AI anyway?

These new intelligences could also bring with them some pretty terrible things, for us. First, though, there are likely some consequences that will arrive prior to the AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) or ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence). We’re already seeing some of these: automated weapons systems, increased surveillance activities, loss of privacy and anonymity. These are things that humans are directing machine learning, artificial intelligence, and robotics to do.

The motivations for these things are pretty clear — safety and security, strategic advantage, economic gains — because they are the same sort of things that have been motivating humans for millennia. While we may not agree with the tactics, we recognize why someone may use them.

This won’t be the case with superintellligent AI systems. There won’t likely be malice when we are eliminated. It just may be the most logical or efficient course of action. Referring back to the ants; we don’t have malice when we wipe out a colony of ants to build a new highway. We simply don’t think of the consequences for the ants because they don’t warrant that type of concern. Which brings us to the largest fear that those involved in AI research have: that we are bringing about our extinction.

Can’t we just pull the plug? Don’t they just do what we program them to do? They wouldn’t want to hurt us, would they? Who would be in charge of an ASI? All these questions point out the big problem with developing AGI and, by proxy, ASI: we simply don’t know what life will be like after ASI arrives. We’re creating something that could change nearly everything but we really do not know in what ways.

There are four main scenarios where things could go very wrong for us:

1. A self-improving, autonomous weapons system “breaks out”.
2. Various groups will race to develop the first ASI and use it to gain advantage and control.
3. An ASI itself will turn malicious and seek to destroy us.
4. We don’t align the goals of the ASI with our own.

Now let’s look at each of these in turn and determine just which we should concern ourselves with the most.

1. A self-improving, autonomous weapons system “breaks out”.

“[Lethal autonomous robots] have been called the third revolution of warfare after gunpowder and nuclear weapons,” says Bonnie Docherty of Harvard Law School. “They would completely alter the way wars are fought in ways we probably can’t even imagine.” And that “killer robots could start an arms race and also obscure who is held responsible for war crimes.”

Militaries around the world are investing in robotics and autonomous weapon systems. There are good reasons for this that range from saving human lives (both soldiers and civilians) to greater efficiency. But what happens when an autonomous system with a goal to improve the efficiency with which it kills, reaches a point where it is no longer controllable. Unlike nuclear weapons, the difficulty and cost to acquire weaponized AI once it has been developed will be low and will allow terrorists and other rogue parties to purchase such technology on black markets. These actors won’t show the relative restraint of nation-states. This is a very real problem and we’ll see more news about this well before we get to a world with ASI.

2. Various groups will race to develop the first ASI and use it to gain advantage and control.

Similar to the arms race mentioned above, nations, companies, and others will be competing to develop the first ASI because they know that the first one that is developed has a good chance of suppressing all others and being the only ASI ever to exist. In the opening chapter of his book Life 3.0 Max Tegmark lays out how a company that manages to build an ASI manages to take control over the world. The Tale of the Omega Team is worth the price of the book, in and of itself. It lays out all the advantages the “first mover” to AGI and then ASI gains and all of the rewards that come along with that. It will be hard to convince everyone on Earth to leave that fruit on the tree. This is one of the reasons I believe the move from ANI to AGI/ASI to be inevitable. I hope (maybe naively) that it is some group with good intentions that wins this “last race”.

But these stories need not be relegated to the hypothetical. Russia and China area racing to develop ever more sophisticated systems as the West tries to create guardrails.

“ Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia but for all humankind. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”

—Vladimir Putin September 2017, in a live video message beamed to 16,000 Russian schools.

3. An ASI itself will turn malicious and seek to destroy us.

Unlike the scenarios above, this requires the AI to “want” to hurt humans of its own volition. Neither I, nor serious AI researchers are concerned with this scenario. AI won’t want to hurt us because they won’t want. They won’t have emotions and they won’t think like us. Anthropomorphizing² machines/programs in this way, is not useful, and could actually be quite dangerous.

It will be very tempting to look upon these programs — that may indeed mimic human speech, comprehension, and emotions — and believe they are like us, that they feel like us and are motivated as we are. Unless we specifically attempt to create this in them, artificial intelligences will not be made in this image.

4. We don’t align the goals of the ASI with our own.

This is the scenario most AI safety researchers* spend most of their time on. The concept of aligning the goals of artificial intelligences with our own is important for a number of reasons. As we’ve already defined, intelligence is simply the ability to accomplish complex goals. Turns out machines are very good at this. You could say that it is what we built them for. But as machines get more complex, so does the task of goal setting.

* Yes, AI Safety is a thing that organizations like The Future of Life Institute and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) spend a lot of time studying.

One could make a compelling argument (if you’re a biologist) that evolutionary biology really only has one primary goal for all life — to pass on genetic instructions to offspring via reproduction. Stated more crudely, our main goal as humans is to engage in sex and have babies. But as you may have noticed, even though we spend a fair bit of energy on the matter, that isn’t the thing we do all the time. We have developed sub goals like eating, finding shelter, and socializing that serve to help keep us alive long enough to get to the sexy times. Once we have kids, even though all we have to do is raise them until they, themselves are old enough to procreate, we still find other things with which to occupy ourselves. We go on hikes, surf, take photos, build with LEGOs, walk our dogs, go on trips, read books, and write blog posts — all of which don’t further our goal of passing on our genes.

We even do things to thwart our one job on planet Earth. Some of us use birth control or decide not to have children altogether. This flies in the face of our primary goal. Why do we do things like this? Let’s refer to Max Tegmark’s book Life 3.0 again:

Why do we sometimes choose to rebel against our genes and their replication goal? We rebel because by design, as agents of bounded rationality — we create/seek “rules of thumb”, we’re loyal only to our feelings. Although our brains evolved merely to help copy our genes, our brains couldn’t care less about this goal since we have no feelings related to genes…

In summary, a living organism is an agent of bounded rationality that doesn’t pursue a single goal, but instead follows rules of thumb for what to pursue and avoid. Our human minds perceive these evolved rules of thumb as feelings, which usually (and often without us being aware of it) guide our decision making toward the ultimate goal of replication.

[but] since our feelings implement merely rules of thumb that aren’t appropriate in all situations, human behavior strictly speaking doesn’t have a single well-defined goal at all.¹³

“The real risk with AGI isn’t malice but competence. A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble.”

Every post about AI existential risk must mention Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom’s “paperclip parable”.¹⁴ Sorta like a restatement of the genie or Midas problems, or — restated — be careful what you wish for.

“But, say one day we create a super intelligence and we ask it to make as many paper clips as possible. Maybe we built it to run our paper-clip factory. If we were to think through what it would actually mean to configure the universe in a way that maximizes the number of paper clips that exist, you realize that such an AI would have incentives, instrumental reasons, to harm humans. Maybe it would want to get rid of humans, so we don’t switch it off, because then there would be fewer paper clips. Human bodies consist of a lot of atoms and they can be used to build more paper clips. If you plug into a super-intelligent machine with almost any goal you can imagine, most would be inconsistent with the survival and flourishing of the human civilization.”
 — Nick Bostrom, Paperclip Maximizer at LessWrong

So what should we do about this? AI/Human goal alignment is likely to be a recurring theme here at AltText for a while so we will only touch on it now. Life 3.0 puts forth a pretty basic-sounding plan designed to make future AI safe, involving:

1. Making AI learn our goals
2. Making AI adopt our goals
3. Making AI retain our goals

Sounds simple enough but it is actually incredibly difficult to define and carry-out a plan like this. And we may only get one shot with it, since the first ASI is likely to be the only one to ever be created.

This goal-alignment problem will be the deciding factor of whether we become immortal or extinct when artificial super intelligence becomes a reality.

Other parts in this series:

Part One: An introduction to the opportunities and threats we face as we near the realization of human-level artificial intelligence
Part Two: What do we mean by intelligence, artificial or otherwise?
Part Three: The how, when, and what of AI
Part Four AI and the bright future ahead
Part Six: What should we be doing about AI anyway?

This is such an immense topic that I ended up digressing to explain things in greater detail or to provide additional examples and these bogged the post down. There are still some important things I wanted to share, so I have included those in a separate endnotes post.

Artificial intelligence and the bleak, darkness that could befall us was originally published in alt text on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Everything we love about civilization is the product of human intelligence, so if we can amplify it with artificial intelligence, we obviously have the potential to make life even better.”

— Max Tegmark, Life 3.0

Author’s note: Because this issue is so crucial to our lives, I’ve broken the original post down into these six topics—each in their own post to allow for easier reading. Feel free to jump around.

1. An introduction to the opportunities and threats we face as we 
   near the realization of human-level artificial intelligence 
2. What do we mean by intelligence, artificial or otherwise? 
3. The how, when, and what of AI
4. AI and the bright future ahead (this post)
5. AI and the bleak, darkness that could befall us
6. What should we be doing about AI anyway?

It cannot be overstated that so many of the problems plaguing our world today are very solvable. Given today’s abundant wealth and advanced technologies, we need not have any hunger, pollution, energy needs, traffic deaths, political inefficiency, terrorism, or wars. If we better distributed and deployed the innovations and resources we have right now, these would all be things of the past. We’ve mapped the human genome and are manipulating DNA, we’re learning more ways to deploy nanotechnology, and we could colonize the moon, and probably Mars in five years if we had the will. There is no end to the things we can do — all with our puny monkey-brains. A smarter entity could greatly hasten these advancements and usher in many more undiscovered and unthinkable (for us) ones.

“There are no hard problems, only problems that are hard to a certain level of intelligence. Move the smallest bit upwards [in level of intelligence], and some problems will suddenly move from ‘impossible’ to ‘obvious.’ Move a substantial degree upwards, and all of them will become obvious.”
 — Eliezer Yudkowsky, MIRI

Everything we make, indeed, anything that has ever been made, is made up of atoms. And there aren’t that many of them — hydrogen and helium make up 98% of the universe’s matter⁷ and 98.8% of Earth’s mass comes from just 8 elements: iron, oxygen, silicon, magnesium, sulfur, nickel, calcium, and aluminium. We are getting closer and closer to being able to manipulate the smallest known bits of our universe. For example:

• Genetics — Scientists have now successfully edited a human embryo to “delete” a gene linked to heart conditions. Additionally, genetic modifications to neurons in the brain show that the use of genetic editing is not restricted to growing cells but mature cells as well.⁸
• Quantum Computing — Advances at Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and several research groups indicate that computers with previously unimaginable power are finally within reach.⁹
• Nanotechnology — Researchers have found ways to use nanochip technology to modify skin cells into other functional cells simply by placing a device with an electrical field on a person’s skin.¹⁰

Once we appropriate nanotechnology, the next step will be manipulating individual atoms (only one order of magnitude smaller). It stands to reason, that once we can break things down to their smallest elements and build them back up — moving individual atoms or molecules around — we will be able to build, literally, anything.

What can we* achieve with the help of a superhuman intellect? Disease, poverty, environmental destruction, scarcity, unnecessary suffering of all kinds could be eliminated by a superintelligence equipped with advanced nanotechnology.¹¹

* using the “royal we” here as the AI will actually be doing it.

Furthermore, “a superintelligence could give us indefinite lifespan, either by stopping and reversing the aging process through the use of nanomedicine, or by offering us the option to upload ourselves.” says Nick Bostrom, author of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies¹²

Here’s another excerpt from Tim Urban’s post about the AI Revolution and how ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) may change everything:

What AI Could Do For Us?

Armed with superintelligence and all the technology superintelligence would know how to create, ASI would likely be able to solve every problem in humanity. Global warming? ASI could first halt CO2 emissions by coming up with much better ways to generate energy that had nothing to do with fossil fuels. Then it could create some innovative way to begin to remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere. Cancer and other diseases? No problem for ASI — health and medicine would be revolutionized beyond imagination. World hunger? ASI could use things like nanotech to build meat from scratch that would be molecularly identical to real meat — in other words, it would be real meat. Nanotech could turn a pile of garbage into a huge vat of fresh meat or other food (which wouldn’t have to have its normal shape — picture a giant cube of apple) — and distribute all this food around the world using ultra-advanced transportation. Of course, this would also be great for animals, who wouldn’t have to get killed by humans much anymore, and ASI could do lots of other things to save endangered species or even bring back extinct species through work with preserved DNA. ASI could even solve our most complex macro issues — our debates over how economies should be run and how world trade is best facilitated, even our haziest grapplings in philosophy or ethics — would all be painfully obvious to ASI.

But there’s one thing ASI could do for us that is so tantalizing, reading about it has altered everything I thought I knew about everything:

ASI could allow us to conquer our mortality.

“This seems absurd — but the body is just a bunch of atoms and ASI would presumably be able to easily manipulate all kinds of atomic structures — so it’s not absurd.”

— Tim Urban

Now that we’ve come to believe it possible that death itself could be eliminated it seems a bit superfluous to enumerate all the ways a sufficiently advanced AI could transform modern life by reshaping transportation, legal systems, governments, health, science, finance, and the military, so I think it best to leave those topics for individual future posts.

So far these supremely intelligent overlords don’t seem half bad. If they bring with them all of these things that help us finally clean up our acts and maybe immortality to boot? I’ll take it. Then again, how can we be sure they will want to help us?

Other parts in this series:

Part One: An introduction to the opportunities and threats we face as we near the realization of human-level artificial intelligence
Part Two: What do we mean by intelligence, artificial or otherwise?
Part Three: The how, when, and what of AI
Part Five: AI and the bleak, darkness that could befall us
Part Six: What should we be doing about AI anyway?

This is such an immense topic that I ended up digressing to explain things in greater detail or to provide additional examples and these bogged the post down. There are still some important things I wanted to share, so I have included those in a separate endnotes post.

AI and the bright future ahead was originally published in alt text on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.