A Human Buglist

When I was about eight years old, two crosses on a page in a "Boy's Book of Wonders" showed me that my eyes were blind, right in the centre of my visual field, AND that my vision was lying to me about what was in the spot. (You can see - that is, fail to see - the blind spot yourself with the demonstration on the Wikipedia.)

This is a fault. A bug. It's not the only one and together they tell us something about what we are.

Bugs have different causes and the blind spot falls into the category of bad engineering design. The eye is a camera made out of jelly and paint, so you wouldn't expect it to be good, but it's still a surprise to find that  something we experience so richly is even worse than it needs to be. The blind spot happens because that's where the optic nerves carrying signal from all the retina sensors bunch together to head off to the brain. The centre seems like a logical place for that to happen, except that because the light sensors are installed on the wrong side of the retina, the nerves have to be in front, blocking the view. It really is a bit of a bodge.

Want some more bad engineering? How about our structure? There's obviously something rather provisional and desperate about our spines. Something that hurts that much can't be right. And what possible purpose can flat feet have?

Of course the classic example of specifically human bad design is childbirth. How many women have been killed - or will die today - through breech delivery, head too big or infection? Other mammals don't get this: When humans got huge heads to fit all the brains in, there should have been a design review of parturition, but that obviously never happened.

So there's plenty of bad engineering, and I would call it buggy, but really that's not what most people mean by a bug. A bug is a software fault: information processing by a program that's written wrong. Software bugs are sometimes caused by poor communication between the designers, imprecision in the specification, lack of skill or inadequate testing, but the classic cause is just wrong assumptions, and it seems to me that all our software bugs are this type.

Optical illusions show this nicely. Starting with the raw images, visual processing detects edges, orientations, movement and higher-level interesting constructs like faces or nudity. But to work under under harsh time pressure it needs to assume that the images on the retina are caused by looking at a physically consistent world. Artful graphics exploit that to confuse one or more levels of processing: The lines are parallel, the image is flat, the circles are stationary, there is no face on Mars and the models are decently dressed (sort of.) Any perception to the contrary is the result of your visual cortex struggling with perverse cues.

OK, but we just identified that our eyes are badly made. Perhaps other senses are better?

It doesn't seem that way. Unlike our eyes, ears are really clever engineering. We have direct and precise frequency analysers in our auditory canals, but we can still be deceived by a Shepard tone -- a mixture of sounds that would never arise in the natural world. And your nose contains a fabulous chemical analyser -- possibly not as good as a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer combo, but a lot faster, so it's a shock that a plant hormone can make sour seem sweet.

The same basic problem - failed assumptions - throws out more trouble in our behavioural choices. The assumptions we make are the those self- and mutually-aware people living in the wild.

• We assume that there is no law. On that basis, honour-based choices - irrational, boundless escalation in the face of any slight or conflict - are a smart move, especially for young males. You get hurt sometimes, but the respect protects you against casual try-ons. But in our society of laws and state-monopoly violence, defence of honour is harmful or horrifying.
• We assume that we're living in an extended group of one or two hundred people. So when we hear of something bad happening to someone, we think it might affect us. That makes us too easily cowed or amazed in a culture that has access to all the interesting or noteworthy events that happen to a global population of billions. We react as if something that has a one-in-a-billion chance has happened to a member of our family.
• We assume that a woman who has sex with a man will bear his children. So, if she's "easy" she's competing - blacklegging - against women who demand a price in fatherly attention for their offspring, or she's sponging his unknowing care on other men's children. And that's why men and women hate slags, even when they benefit from their attentions, or are fond of sex themselves. (I find this quite the most depressing entry on this list.)
• And our appetite assumes that food is scarce, we will do hard physical work most days and you can never get too much sugar, lard or meat. It's no wonder we get fat.

It's worth saying that these are behavioural explanations, not justifications. It's immoral to defend your honour in violation of the law. Natural, thoroughly human, and grossly wrong.

You'll see that I'm going "up the stack" here, from the raw neuronic signals up to more sophisticated processing. There are assumptions all the way, but I'm going to finish with some judgements, with things that as slightly rational thinkers we really might expect to get right, but are still undone by our design assumptions:

• We don't believe in small effects accumulating over a long time, or even small things at all. We have to learn it: "Many a mickle makes a muckle" is wisdom, not intuition. That's why we have to explicitly learn about regular savings, or geology, or washing hands to remove invisible microbes. (And it's why I struggle with computer memory.) We're making judgements in the face of a high assumed probability that we'll die before next spring, so small things really don't matter.
• In the other direction, we care about things that we are aware of, regardless of their actual impact. So when vanishingly small concentrations of pollutants show up on a mass spectroscope, we worry - foolishly.
• We're terrible at statistics. We simply can't do random - we always assume there's a meaning and do what it takes to extract it, even where there is none, with the same avidity that we identify faces on Mars. That's how we end up with webs of belief about magpies or turning three times before looking at the moon.
• Our intuitive metaphysics: cause and effect, things and relations, is an assumption. It works well enough to get through the day, but it has almost nothing to do with the integrated mesh of resonance which is the the way the universe is actually made.
• We think natural things are good and right. But they're not. Which I suppose is my point with this list. We go the wrong way a lot.

I could go on. But I hope this is enough to show that we're a bit of a hack. Stay with me and I'll try and explain why I think that's interesting.

As humans, we cannot really understand - intuitively - what human beings really are. We're too close. But study allows us to see that we are mechanisms (perhaps mechanisms among other things) and what's more, be certain that the mechanism is assembled by natural selection of inherited variations.

Be certain? Certainty is a strong claim. Surely there are other possible explanations, no matter how implausible, for  the excellence of our bodies and the power of our perceptions? There have been many offers: divine design, a striving life force, even alien intervention or ancestor simulators.

I don't think that we can pick between these explanations based on how well we work. Some are more plausible than others, but any of them might be the one. There are lots of reasons to be designed right. What I like to see is where we're working badly. That's interesting.

Tools and limits shape designs. Compare the buildings (or cars) of thirty years ago with those of today to see the effect of full 3D computer design tools. Or study a cheap toy to understand the limits of something designed to be assembled by ill-equipped workers in Chinese sweatshops. (Clue: too many screws.)  It's the flaws and the limits that reveal the capability of the designer. They're side effects, and the only reason for them to be there is because the designer didn't perceive them, didn't care about them, or couldn't get rid of them. Defects and limits speak of necessity, and necessity is hard evidence of identity.

So that's what interests me.

Natural selection never gets to redo from scratch because each change has to be an improvement, no matter how tiny, in one generation. It can make big changes, but only if each step on the way works better in the current circumstances. It has no foresight at all. All the other candidates have a chance to fix what's wrong; God doesn't do mistakes. Simulation authors want to save processor cycles. The aliens can spot the faults just like we can. The life force is defined as striving for perfection. Natural selection is the only really foolish designer.

The mammalian eye is an unfortunate fluke -- mollusc eyes have it the right way round without difficulties. Natural selection can't move the data connections to the back of the retina, because the first intermediate stages to correct it will be blinder than the current design. In the same way, my back hurts because my body plan is a quadruped that has been bent hard wrong to go on two legs all the time. Nothing said "OK, another ape, but this one walking upright." A redesign for two-legged life could have addressed the "big brain delivered through the pelvic girdle" issue too, but it'll never happen because natural selection doesn't do redesigns.

The wrong assumptions come down to the same thing -- a designer utterly lacking in foresight. If God had meant us to see, he would have given us a dedicated GPU, rather than using a brain that can't keep up. Would God have given us an inbuilt honour code when the real moral challenges facing the human race are the global tragedies of the commons, and easy nuclear weapons? (Mind you, I can see simulation authors trying that -- one of the uglier ways to look at the world is that it is a psychology experiment by someone pushing the most vicious and perverse circumstances he can.)

All the stuff we get wrong -- dietary choice, physics and metaphysics, racial distaste, even exotic things like economic fallacies -- all make sense, albeit a bitter and immoral sense in the context of an evolved social species living on the plains. That is who, that is what, we are.

Is that depressing? I think it's rather fine to be a great ape that got lucky; if you don't, that's OK too. But if we can jointly say that there is a mechanism here (whatever else is here too) and that the mechanical works themselves have no special status and many obvious screw-ups, then  there is a way forward. We can try, perhaps not to fix them exactly, but make ourselves the masters, managers and controllers of their harm.

A Letter to My MP for Zero Carbon Britain Day

You could write one too....

Dear

I see that Saturday was Zero Carbon Britain Day. I believe we have to attain zero carbon if we want to keep the world as it is, but I don't think those campaigners' plan will do it. In all the talk of renewables and conservation, please don't lose sight of the current efficacy and future potential of nuclear power.

I don't want to live in a country where firms lay off workers and where poor people sit in the dark when the price of electricity goes up at evening peak, or because the wind has fallen. But I am still convinced -- for all the reasons we know so well -- that Britain and the world have to give up emitting  carbon dioxide to generate electricity. Renewables are fascinating, but they can't bridge that gap -- the numbers don't work now and still don't work even if we cover the country with wind farms and make big technical improvements in solar technology. The sad truth is that energy policy has much the same cruel arithmetic as dieting. Pure renewable solutions are like fad diets -- they sound great and seem plausible, but they just won't deliver the calories.

Conservation sounds cosy and tidy, and it's central to any pure renewable scheme, but, on the scale we'll need, it's just a polite way to describe the darkened homes and factories that will result from high prices at peak times and seasons: A feed-in tariff of 44p/unit is just a glimpse at the true peak price of renewable energy. If we want to avoid that then we must choose between stumbling into dependence on fracking shale gas with its gross environmental negatives, or much more nuclear power.

I expect you get all the lobbying you want from current nuclear power sellers. And I don't quarrel with what they are selling -- it's the right thing to do now -- I just want you to be aware that we as a civilisation can do much better. All of the problems with current nuclear technology can be substantially mitigated or removed. Few green campaigners will tell you this, because they want society to change -- energy starvation is their tool to wind down the current world. And lobbyists from Areva and Westinghouse won't tell you because they have a "razor and blades" (current reactors and fuel assemblies) model to sell. So I'm telling you here!

• Fission reactors can be intrinsically safe. The "P" (for pressurised) in "PWR" explains some of what went wrong at Fukushima. Current designs manage that risk much better, but replacing water with molten salt or liquid metal coolants avoids the need for high pressure altogether. Liquid core designs won't have fuel cans that can generate explosive hydrogen; and when cooling pumps fail, liquid cores can flow into flat pans to cool safely in containment.
• We don't need to make plutonium and risk weapons proliferation. The current uranium fuel cycle arises from the mad dash for bomb fuel in the 40s and 50s. The natural conservatism and government direction of the nuclear power industry since then has kept it unchanged, even though we struggle to consume or keep safe the plutonium that's being made. The alternative thorium/uranium breeder cycle makes much, much less plutonium, and the fuel it creates for reactors is too contaminated to build a bomb. Local reprocessing means we don't have to move fuels around the country.
• Nuclear fission power can be sustainable at modest cost for a very long time. We currently consume a rare isotope -- just half a percent -- of  the mined uranium, in fragile fuel rods that have to be scrapped before they've consumed even that sad expensive fraction. Liquid cores don't need manufactured fuel rods,  breeder cycles can create fuel from bulk uranium or thorium, and thorium is three times more common than uranium. There are many millions of tons of easily available thorium, and each ton could power a large reactor for a year.  
• Nuclear waste is much more manageable than we have been told. Thorium cycle liquid core reactors could run continuous reprocessing to avoid creating the transuranic elements that make waste active for tens of thousands of years. Without transuranics, the residual fission product waste decays much faster, falling to the radioactivity level of mined ore in hundreds rather than thousands of years, and the volumes are in the order of hundreds of kilos per reactor per year. We can deal indefinitely with that.

These ideas and others like them have been around for a while. They're sound, tested at some scale and they look economical. It's not really a surprise that sixty years of  nuclear engineering and new tools like computer modelling have produced improvements over reactors that were designed by hand to power warships and make plenty of plutonium.

What we don't have is money behind these ideas. This is a classic market failure. The key design choices are long out of patent -- the only way to make money now will be to invest in the work to scale these ideas to commercial sizes. There are limits to what legislators and the government can do here, but I would like to make a few suggestions:

• Support current nuclear plans. They're not ideal, but they're better than the alternatives.
• Ask questions. Where is our British nuclear direction? Are we content to buy French and American reactors for ever? Is this a global market we want Britain to abandon? Does that help re-orient the British economy to manufacturing?
• Lead your constituents and your colleagues to expect and demand a big contribution from nuclear power and nuclear engineering.
• Think about the billions going to fusion research at ITER and elsewhere. That's good quality, exciting, research, but perhaps we should also be able to fund smaller budgets to look at next-generation fission and reprocessing. Britain has excellent traditions of research in chemical and nuclear engineering and, unlike fusion, we know, before we start, that it will work. 

This issue won't go away in our lifetimes -- I'm writing because I think it's important for my children and their children. It won't be resolved either. I hope you will consider my views as the debate goes on.

With Regards


Fat Tom

Property <> Intellectual Property

Remember the Cassette and Crossbones?  "Home taping is killing music?" I do, but it never made me feel like a pirate. How about "You wouldn't steal a handbag?" Well, I wouldn't steal a handbag, but that has nothing to do with copying movies.


I have tried to take intellectual property seriously. I have been to seminars on the legal issues. I have lectured my customers' filesharing children about artists' incomes. I have paid money to Microsoft and actively sought free software. I have lectured my own children... and it just doesn't work. I pay for music downloads but I can't suppress the feeling that I am being cheated. I see Google stealing from authors by putting copyright books online and I just want to cheer... I don't think I'm alone; what's wrong?

There certainly is something wrong. Vast numbers of people are benefitting from work done by all sorts of creative types, without any intention of paying for it. Political, moral and economic rationales are conjured up, but it all boils down to a distaste for paying simply to make a copy or use a design. I feel that distaste, even though I know how wrong it is.

It's a commonplace that this problem arose when copying became easy. CDs, books and videos were fine to sell, if slightly dodgy to lend, when copying was laborious. We didn't think that was unreasonable at all. But as digitisation advances, so does copying. More or less fumbling attempts at DRM are swept away by the glum intractability of encryption and something that people were happy to buy and keep as a chattel in a plastic box, becomes a digital copy that we are happy to grab for free, and give to a hundred total strangers.

And this is a problem. Whatever you might think of Jedward or Jethro Tull, you will agree that among other things, they are economic actors. They work, they want to get paid, and if they chose to sell content, they are entitled to do so. They don't have to make recordings, but since we buy them we evidently want them to, and within reason they should be allowed, like any producer, to set their own price in the context of the market. ("Within reason"? Yes. All creatives are somewhat monopoly providers, and that's a market failure we're entitled to mitigate with life limits and fair use.) You might not miss Jedward, but I guarantee that your life has been enriched by ideas and expressions that someone made because they got paid to do so. We need this to go on.

So, why don't we take copyright seriously? My view is that it does not fit into the natural psychological "kinds" that are part of human nature. That's bad news, but we may be able to use the idea to salvage a way forward.

Fifty years ago human psychology was regarded as a social artefact, and our feelings about property were taken to be a result of growing up in the corrupt old world as it is. Remember "Property is Theft"? Not everyone believed that the purpose of property was oppression, but it was reasonable to claim that we could create a new category of property -- "Intellectual Property" -- by setting up the legal and market structures to support it.

That view of psychology is no longer so widely supported. Nowadays, gorged on a torrent or experimental data, it's possible to talk about a fundamental human nature as the root of our drives. I think this newer (and much older view) is correct. Property is not made up by jurists or bosses to create a social contract or to oppress the poor. It's the abstraction of our natural tendency -- our feeling -- to acknowledge exclusive rights in territory and things. (Those two properties are not the same -- they feel different -- and that's why we talk about real property which is land and things dependent on land, and about chattels which are everything else.)

It's not good enough say it's natural and leave it at that. The idea of a Natural Law, something which is internal to every human and the same for all, goes back to Aquinas and doubtless earlier. Since it's "obviously" true it went without challenge until philosophers began to be severely embarrassed by the theism which seemed to be the only possible explanation. The basis for the modern view is that a divine creator is not necessary, that human behaviours or rather the feelings that lead to them, are phenotypes -- like haemoglobin or opposable thumbs -- which have been shaped by natural selection. 

We say that these tendencies must be founded in superior reproductive outcomes: People who were a little more prone than their neighbours to acknowledge the property of others or to preserve their own, survived to have more grandchildren, who themselves inherited the same tendency. I guess that there would be more than one mechanism for this, but staying out of fights -- turf wars -- would be one, and getting better value out of the work that goes to make a basket or a bowstring would be another. The proneness can be very vague, just an occasional by-product of some other habit, but provided it inherits, that is enough for natural selection to take hold and multiply.

The implication of this view is that we aren't able to make something into property by just calling it so. If it doesn't feel like property, it's not property, and we will never acknowledge it in the same way. Property has to fit a template that matches lots of things like "identifiable", "tangible", "scarce" and "hard to reproduce". This has nothing to do with the justice of the position. We can acknowledge -- intellectually -- that the creators of a work of art deserve to benefit from their labour, just as our ancestors accepted, naturally, that the creator of an axe was entitled to control the use of it, but in a world where ideas can be duplicated endlessly and for free, the hope that we can turn IP into actual experienced property doesn't fit and won't work.

A video tape in a box? That's a chattel. A rip of a DVD? Whatever it is, it's not property. It's the denial that means that we don't think that the people who copy it are pirates, and the act isn't theft.

Does this seem too radical? We do acknowledge intellectual property, don't we?

I don't think we do.

You don't have to go far back in history to find a time when copyright was weird. The framers of the US constitution were modern enough to empower the federal congress to create IP law, but tellingly, they hardly mentioned natural property at all. That was totally obvious, and obviously a matter for the states. And then, decades later, the congress used its power to create intellectual property law, but did so in a way which pillaged foreign rights holders. It's pretty clear that framers and congress both regarded intellectual property as something well out of the usual way.

And if that doesn't convince you, how about China? Do you want to call it a nation of a billion knowing criminals? because it's not, they're moral people, but the nation hardly gives a moment's consideration to intellectual property in its day-to-day life.

So this seems like an attractive idea. Property is real because it's part of human nature, and intellectual property isn't. But there's a problem, because the most important sort of property is money and money is not human nature. Money is an invention, one of the most fruitful and productive inventions ever -- and absolutely not part of our natural capacities. And so, if we can invent and use money, why can't we invent and use intellectual property, and defend it with the same fervency and legitimacy that we defend money?

I don't know the answer to this. It's a question for practical psychology. I suspect it will simply be that one of the features that make money such a good trick is that it happens to check the boxes in our minds that identify chattel property. On that view, money works because it allows us to turn our intrinsic chattel-handling capacity into a tool for managing abstract value. I know that I still think of money as a pile of coins and I'm more familiar with finance than most people. The key win with money is that it only works if it can't be copied, so even though it's digital, it fits our minds well enough. But only well enough, not perfectly. I think that the reason we are never entirely happy with paid organ donation or prostitution, or market pricing, or interest, is because money just doesn't ever feel quite right. It's a fit, but not a perfect fit -- things like quantitive easing, fungibility and seigneurage wreck the illusion -- and the jarring hurts. IP is further away from the natural kind, too far to fit, and we can't make it work at all.

So I suspect the idea of a copyright or a patent as a chattel-like thing is doomed, but that doesn’t remove the moral (and economic) imperative to pay creators and defend their rights. What are we to do?

Well, I don't know. I think we might be too bound up in the web of international copyright conventions, and the entrenched legal structures, not to mention the reflexes of lobbyists, to actually change anything substantial at least in the short term.

But if it was my job to fix this, to start the move to a world where digital content was fairly paid for in a widely accepted way, I would begin far below that. We have to learn from the success of money: money fits the chattel concept well enough to work, and we have to bend IP to fit too. But part of the chattel idea is that they don't reproduce. If copying is easy, the chattel model will never work.

My proposal is to use territory instead. It's not land -- this territory exists in the cultural world, a world which is being endlessly explored and extended by creators and interpreters. The idea here is that the copying status is irrelevant: there is an album called "Living in the Past," a real thing which is independent of plastic disc, digital encoding or any specific performance, and that thing remains the private turf of Ian Anderson. We made the Internet into a place, we can make the cultural space real, and if we learn to accept it as a space we can learn to believe in the reality of turf rights within it, too.

This is not a project for lawyers. I suspect that much of the legal structure can stay -- we'll certainly need the limits on life, and the rights of limited free use that we have now, to deal with the creator's otherwise unbearable monopoly. We probably need to go further that way. It would be good if the creators would say how they want their stuff used and how they want to be paid -- which sounds easy but is so hard because they have to agree to work in a model that we are psychologically equipped to accept, and they may not like it.

So the first stage is education, and it might take a while. We need a generation of creators and consumers that understands that IP is the private turf of the creators, and the rest of us are allowed into that estate on terms they set. Then we will be able to start building the appallingly complex web of licences, rents, legal rights of way, control of attractive nuisances  and everything else we need to make a fair and acceptable intellectual property system.

Practical steps? Things that rights owners can do now?

First, I would stifle all the idiots who harm their own cause by accusing ordinary decent people of theft and piracy. I understand the rage, but it has to stop. These are terrible words for terrible things and they have a totally negative, reverse effect when you hurl them at people who know that, inside, they don't feel any guilt at all. 

Second, I would review the language used all the way through contracts and discussions and everywhere else to make sure that it moves away from the failed chattel model. The words to use should come from the idea of territory and trespass instead of things and theft.


And I would start to test my enforcement actions against the new standard. Trespass involves demonstrable loss. Without a theory of loss that people can accept, legal actions will discredit the idea of copyright and, long term, do me more harm than they'll ever prevent.


We have to take the poison out of this. Maybe I'm wrong, and best way forward is to talk about wages for creators. Maybe I'm right, or maybe we should be setting up wages and territory both. But I don't want to live in a world where creators don't get paid. We have to do something, and this at least offers some hope.

No2AV

I can live with pretty much any voting scheme AV, STV, FPTP, FML or whatever that keeps the link between MP and constituency. But I still think change is a bad idea. The more proportional schemes like AV are concerning, not because they are hard or complex, but:

• They might work -- deliver a fairer representation -- and we wouldn't like it.
• They pretty much miss the point of elections entirely

I respect people who say that AV is too complex and slow to count, but I don't think those are important arguments. Sure it doesn't seem complex, but the fact is that many voters are quite simple. We know that the name at the top of the ballot routinely gets a 5% advantage -- the only way makes sense is that some people don't really understand what the vote is and just check off the top box. So, yes, the numbers of the flummoxed will rise once they have to record a second preference, and those people will effectively lose some of their vote under AV. That's a valid argument, but I don't really think it's a clincher. And having to wait a day to two for results is only a problem for the news media. Who cares?

My first objections are based on the risk that AV will work as intended. That the use of second preference votes will push up the representation of smaller parties in a way that reflects the preferences of the voters: people will be more willing to vote for (say) UKIP if they know that their second preference can go to elect the Conservative who is much more likely to win. All those first votes will sometimes leave a minority party in the running, and the result will be that we have more Green/UKIP/Respect/etc MPs. And that seems fair -- we're getting a parliament which mirrors in its MPs the party favours of the electors.

And it is fair. It's also a Bad Thing!

We'll get more coalitions, because minor party MPs make it more likely that neither Labour or Tories can whip a majority into the House of Commons. I'm not against coalitions; anyone who's been active in a political party knows that coalitions is what parties are: Libertarians & hanger/floggers join together in the Tories in the same way that non-conformism & distaste for enterprise make up Labour. Party disagreement and compromise is the bread and butter of political correspondents. When we have a Labour or Tory government, that government is still a coalition, and the range of opinion is hardly less than the current cabinet. The important distinction is that the voters get to see the manifesto before they vote. I rather admire the present government's programme, but the process by which it was put together was, in a purported democracy, disgusting: Party leaders cooked up a list of points in secret discussions, MPs got a vote to take it or leave it, and the country -- the voters -- just have to take it. It's horrible, but if lots of minor party MPs mean you have to form coalitions after the election, there is no other way.

Even if you like post-election coalitions, we're still running a huge risk if we make them more likely. The problem is this: under a more proportional system, then the balance of power -- the selection of left or right -- tends to lie with the smaller parties. If we're lucky that's the Liberals. But it might equally well be the BNP. I'm against that; I'm so far against it that I don't even want to put that temptation in front of party leaders. (And if you think the BNP would only enter a coalition with the Tories, you haven't studied what they want.)

So that's the first set of objections. It might work, it might be fair, and that would be bad.

But AV also fails in a much more important way. AV fails because any scheme that encourages fairness, proportionality or whatever, misses the point of elections:

• We don't have elections to set the complexion of the Commons. That's not what they're for.

After the first six months the balance of opinion at the last election is largely irrelevant. A year-old opinion poll is scrap paper. The purpose of elections is to seat MPs who will hold the government to account -- any constituency-based system can do that -- and, much more importantly, to put the cabinet, every minister, in MORTAL TERROR of the voters!

Does that matter? It matters more than almost anything else. This polite Jacobinism is the true essence of modern democracy. This isn't Athens. Because it's too complex for us to participate, routinely, in every policy choice, we leave them to the government, and that means we leave them to ministers. Not to MPs: To ministers, the executive.

That's not a bad system, but it needs to be controlled or it'll go bad. I don't want ministers to make choices as if they have the Daily Beast second-guessing them all the time, but I do want them to have the welfare of the people in the broad sense as their basic guide. Part of that can be parliamentary scrutiny, but scrutiny doesn't always work. For example, the choices that the energy minister will shortly make about electricity generation are crucial for the future of the country. But what is the value of MP's opinions on electricity? Well, few of them could even tell you how many windmills equal a coal or nuclear station or what the wind speed correlation across the country is. Many of them are looking at the news from Japan and thinking that explosions in a nuclear power plant = nuclear explosions. Parliamentary scrutiny can't help the minister deal with what is fundamentally an expert choice.

And direct voter involvement won't help much. The minister won't read my letters and my MP won't understand. Most voters will have nothing worthwhile to say. So the issue will be resolved by the ministers views, however stupid; by lobbying, however short-sightedly selfish; and by advice from his civil servants, God bless them.

That makes the future look pretty dark -- literally dark in this case. But there is another factor that the minister will bear in mind. If he cocks up he will lose his job. If the government cocks up, all the ministers will lose their jobs and the other lot will have a go. They hate that. Politicians -- even LibDems -- become politicians to get power, and losing an election takes it all away. They will do what is necessary to keep their jobs if they possibly can.

And this is the key. We need  an electoral system that can turf out the government -- all the ministers -- so that they fear us. And if the system routinely puts centre parties in government, it will fail this fundamental test. This time, FPTP did create a coalition, and it may do so again, but the historical trend is for single-party governments.

Consider a minister from a centre party in a coalition cabinet in a PR system, and Energy Minister Huhne makes a perfect example. Lets assume he cocks up, doesn't start building nukes and the government very properly gets the blame when they start to plan electricity rationing. That's going to turn the country against the Tories, but it's much less likely that the Liberals will suffer in the same way. If Huhne keeps his seat and his position in the Liberal party, then the PR system is likely to create a Labour-led coalition, and Huhne is likely move smoothly into a ministerial position in in it. As he does so he may well reflect that he can do whatever he pleases and never take the consequences. AV has succeeded for him and failed for us, and we are on the way to an untouchable political class.

The first rule of a decent electoral system is that it can turn every minister out of his office, just to make sure that they all fear us. FPTP voting seems very unfair, but it will deliver on this first requirement when no other system can. That's the basic qualification, and that's why we should say "No" to AV.

Special Training

This was in my email. I suppose I should be grateful that someone assumes that I'm so honest that I don't aready know how to bribe and corrupt.

The Watson Surprise

IBM and CMU have written a computer program called Watson that can play Jeopardy, and when it runs on some expensive but achievable hardware it can win against successful human players. If you don't believe me, here's the video, if you do believe me but find yourself thinking that it's all a bit ho-hum and computerish then I want to tell you why I think it is the biggest thing I've learned lately. Either way, there's a nice twenty-minute introductory talk.

We all know that chess computers can beat any human player other than a total freak. IBM have the best, as it happens, the program that defeated Gary Kasparov. But it doesn't seem to be that important. I don't mind being beaten at chess; I'm so rubbish at chess that I've never bothered with it, but I regard myself as reasonably human nonetheless. And there are programs for Snap, and Go, and Noughts and Crosses, all of which which operate more or less successfully against human players. The usual complaint -- especially from losers -- is that the computer is a dull player: in a solved game, one where every legal game can be enumerated, like draughts, it will just pick the exact best move and never lose. Dull. In an unsolved game like Go, or Chess they play textbook openings and end games, and tend to grope for short-term advantage in the middle. Dull. Definitely not human or (nooo!) intelligent.

Jeopardy isn't that sort of game. It's a TV trivia quiz that's designed to be hard to cheat at. The video shows it better than I can describe, but it rewards language comprehension, general -- sometimes very general -- knowledge, and knowing when you don't know the answer. It's designed for humans. Assuming the video I've linked isn't a total con (IBM has many faults, but not weak integrity) the computer is able to play at a level vastly above the point I could ever reach. Whether it wins or loses is irrelevant, if it can hold its own against any human player at all it's doing amazingly well. I am astonished by the quality of what's been achieved here; in one sense I've been expecting this for 25 years, but I never expected it would be so slick, or that it would handle spoken input, or manage without a semantic net.
It's extracting words from the spoken question. I knew speech recognition has come on but I didn't know it had come that far. I'm assuming they're allowed to train it against the questionmaster's voice otherwise I would have said that it was impossible. [12/2 actually -- it is impossible, and it's not what happens. Watson gets the text of the question when the master finishes reading it.]
It's handling the sense if not the meaning of the question. Jeopardy questions are somewhat stereotyped -- contestants will never be asked whether Christianity or Buddhism is the way to live, the right way forward in economic policy or even how to balance a walking stick on their finger -- but still tough enough to force real people to think, and much too tough for any AI I ever saw before. Add on the breadth of the question domain -- the whole of trivia and general knowledge -- and the challenge becomes outrageous.
It's answering -- correctly -- under time pressure. I couldn't answer some of those questions even if I had all the time I wanted. Watson is doing it without any semantic structure -- it's just breaking out the surface grammar, going a little further -- just far enough -- picking out some likely answers from its texts, and, crucially, setting a confidence level that will tell it whether to press the buzzer.
This answering style puts it so far from a human, but close at the same time. Our knowledge structures certainly have a linguistic element, especially in retrieval, but they go deeper -- much deeper -- sometimes. There's much more to reading a book than learning the meaning of the sentences. So Watson doesn't follow us there, though there is no reason why it couldn't eventually come at least some of the way. But where I think it's very human is in the approach to finding the answers (and understanding the questions as well.)

We're not conscious of all our half-baked ideas, the loser remarks that never get access to the speech centres, or the clumsy movement plans that are all suppressed by our internal censors long before they get near the surface. Our consciousness is the narrative constructed around the successes -- the things we actually do and say and think -- and the dream world underneath is mostly inaccessible. But it's real, (mine is apparently really obvious to the people around me!) and it's been copied, or perhaps mimicked (we'll soon learn if that's a meaningful distinction) in Watson. Many different plans kick off at once. They feed into each other, they mark themselves up and down, and in a few hundred milliseconds they settle on a few best picks, and the highest score wins. And because this is Jeopardy, if none of the plans are good, the machine sits tight and does nothing -- but if it thinks it knows, it presses the button and utters the answer.

I hope I've made myself clear here. I don't think it's answering in the exact way a human would. When Stephen Wolfram says it's quite like a search engine, then he's got a point, but then I also think search engines, struggling as they do with relevance, are trying hard to be like us. I realise it keeps up by trading superficial comprehension against inhumanly fast flat access to its entire text base. The memory on the computer array they use is vastly greater than the storage required for the raw knowledge text, and I suspect a fair slice of that goes in the indexing required to turn words into associative symbols. What I do think is that they have a working model of key human intellectual functions. It's at the interesting level -- symbol processing -- rather than the emulated goop of neural networks. And it addresses things we all respect -- language, understanding, knowledge, swiftness and risk. And, unlike the chess programs, it's not a dead end. It's obvious that Watson scales, it's obvious it operates in an open domain, and it's obvious that it could obtain a much deeper level of understanding than it currently does.

Chatter about this is building and it's never been a secret, though they seem pretty coy about the innards. Looking at the quality of the videos on Youtube and other stuff on IBM Research, it's clear that IBM are taking this very seriously, and I suspect that when Watson plays on network TV on 14 February we will all hear a lot about it. So it's worth thinking about what it's not, and whether it matters.

Essentially, Watson is, at the moment, what it was built to be, which is a question answerer. It's not a general purpose artificial intelligence. It can't control a chemical works, or manage NATO Air Land doctrine on a real battlefield. It certainly can't choose between the Christ and the Buddha -- in fact it can't even make a routine investment choice or any other judgement. It can't express a thought. It doesn't want to hear you moaning about Rupert Murdoch even if that's what it takes to pass a Turing test. It doesn't want anything really, it doesn't know anything exists and it's not even dimly conscious. It's never met anybody and it's certainly not a team player. It's definitely still legal to switch it off. But I can't help thinking that the model IBM have built -- the co-operating, competing, alternative processes -- puts it on the way to all of these things. If the researchers go on to get any decent distance down that route, the world will change, and so will we.

Why Kepler (and Fermi) give me Fear

NASA have a magically sensitive light meter in orbit, pointed permanently at a sliver of the sky in Cygnus. This instrument is called Kepler and its purpose is to search for planets orbiting those stars it can see. And that is what it has been doing: it's found fifteen so far, and it's got hundreds of candidates and years to run. Right now it's finding huge planets in close orbits, because they cause frequent big bobbles in the light curve; as time goes on and the data piles up it will be able to find smaller planets further from their suns: planets like Earth. We don't know how many it will find -- data from Kepler and others suggests that solar systems are typically tighter than ours -- but it will certainly find some. And the geometry of transits means that for every world it finds, it'll miss dozens more.

Up till now, it's been possible to believe that planets were rare, that the universe is overwhelmingly plasma: hot or wildly diffuse or both. It's true that planets are insignificant in the total mass of the universe, but we care about them and Kepler tells us that there's plenty to care about. In all probability, scaling from Kepler, the galaxy has countless thousands of rocky worlds with suns that keep them at or near liquid-water temperatures for billions of years. Life worlds in fact -- not worlds we'd necessarily like very much, but suitable homes for whatever's evolved there.

Sixty years ago, most of this was already known. The astronomers had won the long argument: the stars are billions, not millions, of years old. The physicists conceded once they realised that stellar cores are nuclear fusion furnaces that can hold a star like the sun at a roughly constant heat output for eight or ten billion years. That discovery made it intellectually respectable to discuss billion-year ages for the earth, and the life on it.

And that brings us to Enrico Fermi: the great synthesist, father of nuclear power and asker -- sixty years ago -- of the question that's worried me since I heard it. It's called Fermi's paradox. He estimated the number and age of earthy planets -- planets that should build advanced cultures in a few billion years -- and asked:

• "Where Is Everybody?" 

Does that seem strange? Discovery or contact with extraterrestrials is generally imagined as a rare or impossible event. But Fermi was asking why we didn't see them everywhere we looked. He knew that a technical culture -- like ours -- was already conspicuous on a stellar scale, just a hundred years since we started using electricity. The broadcast stations and air defence radars of the war just finished had sent obviously artificial signals that were already passing the nearest stars. In thirty thousand years, the people of Earth will have announced themselves to every planet in the galaxy. That seems like a long time, but against the age of the stars it's infinitesimal. Given the likely number of worlds -- confirmed by Kepler -- there should be many technical civilisations active in the galaxy at once, and since ours is so young most of them will be more advanced -- more conspicuous -- than us.

We can't really tell what an advanced civilisation would do. Perhaps we would see radio emissions. Perhaps we would see large-scale engineering like ringed stars, or even the glare from the engines required to move from star to star. But we all know that there's nothing. The universe looks wild, natural, at every wavelength, at every scale. There may be life on other worlds, there may even be sentience, but to all appearances there are no engineers.

• So. Why is that? Where ARE the aliens?

There are plenty of answers to Fermi's question, but they can be lumped into just two categories: reasons why technical cultures like ours never arise, or why they always fail:

• The"never arise" list is a ragbag -- dozens of improbable or ad hoc claims: "By chance we are the first;" "Life can never develop without a moon that exactly eclipses the sun;" or there's my favourite: "Eukaryotic cells are highly unlikely to evolve." But we are here, so we know that none of these can be absolute. Explaining our loneliness with one of these, or even the whole list, it boils down to being a matter of chance, a fluke. It may BE so, but we don't know, and I struggle to believe that any of these could be true enough, in a galaxy with the countless potential worlds revealed by Kepler.

• The "always fail" list is just as long but much grimmer, because any or all of the reasons could be true,  up in our future, and not far off either. It's not enough to say "Technical civilisations cannot last." They have to disappear quickly, so there's only one at any time, and they can't leave a mark that we would see. Within a generation or two -- it has to be really soon because there are so many candidate planets -- we stop broadcasting. We never terraform the solar system. We never cross to other stars. We are now seeing the height of human development, and soon war, environmental degradation, philosophical attitudes, energy prices, the galactic empire's pest exterminators, or whatever ambush it is, will knock us so far back that tens of millions of years will pass before Earth (it won't be Us) tries, and fails, again. For my money, the "always fail" list seems much more plausible -- any or all of them could be true.

The "always fail" list is horrifying. We're doomed. The fall may be so close that people alive today may have to handle the consequences, and if it's that fast it will not be pleasant. Having those children may turn out to have been a serious moral error.


If you want hope for the future, you need to find an adequate answer somewhere in the "never arise" list. Because, if that's right, then once we're past those hazards (and we already ARE), there's no telling what we'll do, in a galaxy that we own. It's up to us.


The problem is that the best chance, the most plausible reason to permit us to be an oddity, was "planets are rare." It could have been true, but Kepler results show that it's not. We have to look again, to find something improbable in the long history from the lifeless Earth to our technical civilisation. The origin of life seemed a good choice, but we can date that now, and it seems to go back to just a short time after the formation of liquid water: Unless that's a huge fluke, life isn't improbable at all, and it will arise on every water world. 


That's why I know more than I should about eukaryotes. I'm hoping that the step from simple cells to structured ones that can gang up into organisms was difficult, implausible. It took a good few billion years in our history, and I take that as a sign that it was far from inevitable, but I can't really persuade myself that that's true. Effectively, I'm hoping that we can look at  world after earthy world, each with oceans teeming with bacteria, and nothing but slime on the land.


We'll know soon. Here's another name: James Webb. That's the NASA administrator whose name adorns the successor to the Hubble telescope. When Kepler starts listing earthlike worlds, the huge objective mirror of the Webb telescope will be turned towards them, and its spectroscopes will analyse, photon by photon, light that has glanced off alien oceans and strange leaves. Results from each individual planet will tell us little, but as the numbers pile up, we'll know: bacteria, or plants.


If it's plants, that will tell us that eukaryotes are common, and to my mind a world with eukaryotes will have engineers in time. And that says that the reason we seek, the answer to Fermi, is in the always "fail list." I won't be surprised. The "never arise" reasons all boil down to saying that Earth or the Sun or life here is special in some way. In the whole history of modern astronomy, from Copernicus on, that's never been the way to bet. Kepler's observations have taken us one stage further down that road, and there is extinction at the end.