Ricardo, Author at Ricardo Pinto

China’s One Child Policy

Ricardo on 3rd November 2015

Much of the reaction to the recent change in China’s ‘one child policy’ seemed to focus on human rights: specifically the right of a woman to have as many children as she wants. A woman’s control of her own fertility has been dearly bought – for most of history women’s bodies have been controlled by men. In many places today they still are. Nevertheless, it seems to me that this issue has another side that needs to be expressed: our need to control our population.

We know that we are facing many worsening global problems: climate change, ecological degradation, species extinction, soil depletion, a diminishing availability of fresh water. Related to these is our ongoing struggle to feed ourselves, to provide a decent standard of living for people, medical care, education and general life opportunities. These challenges are directly related to how many of us there are now, and how many of us there will be in the future.

We also know that the rate of increase in our population is slowing. Some reasons given for this are decreasing infant mortality, the education of women and the availability of contraception. Given an improved standard of living, people choose to have fewer children.

Nevertheless, our population continues to grow and even the most optimistic forecasts suggest that a peak of something like 9 billion may be reached around the middle of this century, and thereafter, all other circumstances being favourable, our numbers will begin to come down. There are good reasons for supposing that circumstances may be anything but favourable. Even if they are, it seems inevitable that the ecosystems of our planet, and the other creatures that we share them with, are going to be badly damaged. It seems that we are unable or unwilling to make the changes that are necessary to ameliorate the worst of that damage.

It is in this context that I feel that we should be appraising the Chinese one child policy. For all the infelicities that have attended its implementation, the estimate for how many fewer people there are in China today is in the order of 400 million. Consider that, during the Chinese economic ‘miracle’, it has been calculated that perhaps 500 million people have been lifted out of poverty. These two figures are strikingly close to each other. In Africa, various countries that have increased their GDP dramatically over the past decades, have not seen a rise in the standard of living of their people because their populations increased so as to leave the average income much as it was before.

The Chinese authorities have said that they have relaxed their one child policy in response to the increasing imbalance there is in China between the old and the young. Taken together with the apparent lack of desire that the Chinese now have for big families, I find it hard to believe that what is going on is anything other than the result of careful planning. It seems to me unlikely that the Chinese planners in 1979 did not forsee that their one child policy would result in the age imbalance that we see today in China. Is it hard to imagine that they judged that, if they kept the policy in place for two generations, they would change the traditional desire for a large family, by showing their people through lived experience how much better their lives would be with fewer children to feed and educate? That this may have come at the cost of skewing the age profile was perhaps a price they were prepared to pay. Exchanging the certainty of disaster – let us not forget that China had a famine well within living memory and that they feed 19% of the world’s population with only 8% of the world’s arable land – for a problem that after all is one that they share with us here in Europe. A problem that, because of recent developments in technology, we are in a better place to deal with than we have ever been.

Given the magnitude of the risks we face, we may no longer have the luxury of having all the freedoms we may desire. Chief among these may be the right to have as many children as we want. Though we must do everything we can to protect a woman’s rights over her own body, we must also protect the human rights and life chances of children alive today, and of those yet to be born.

edited by a friend who prefers to stay anonymous

do we need a Butlerian Jihad?

Ricardo on 29th October 2015

Assaulted by any number of articles on the rapid advance of ‘deep learning’, I have been awoken to the reality that the pattern recognition abilities of computers have galloped ahead, so that my cosy complacency that computers were useless at recognising faces, understanding what was in a photograph etc – something that we are so brilliant at – has been overturned. Not only can computers understand what they’re seeing in a photograph, but they will soon be able to do so better than we can. The advance of computers is like that: you look away imagining that it is going to creep along, as most things in our experience do, and when you look back you see that it has leapt light years ahead. That the speed of technological progress takes us by surprise demonstrates how it is a process alien to how we see the world. This must surely be innate in us, because if it were simply something socialised into us, we, having lived through a period of constant and furious change, would not be constantly taken by surprise.

In the deep backstory of Frank Herbert’s Dune is a revolt against intelligent machines that, as a child, I saw as being merely Luddite. This revolt, the Butlerian Jihad, has at its heart the commandment: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind”. Interesting how this resonates with the Biblical injunction (Islamic too) that: “Thou shalt not worship graven images”. I think an argument could be made to show how the former not only resonates with the latter, but that in a very real way, the former is a direct consequence of the latter. The desire to create machines that can think – even machines that might become far superior thinkers than we are – has surely an element of vanity in it, and is possessed of the hubris that we can remake the world and make it better.

The threat that we are facing is that computers will replace white-collar jobs, even creative ones, as machines replaced so many manual jobs in the past. Comparisons are being made with the Industrial Revolution. This new technological revolution is seen to be as inevitable as the Industrial Revolution, and that it may – after much suffering – eventually also usher in a better state of things. So it may be that any attempts to fight this are as doomed as the Luddites attempting to smash up the power looms that were taking away their livelihood. But is this true? The inevitability of the Industrial Revolution was surely due to the disparity in power between the mill owners and their workers, and those workers were in turn the agricultural workers thrown off the land by the earlier – also seen as inevitable – Agricultural Revolution that was only possible because of the disparity in power between those workers and the landowners. Are we so powerless today? Are we bound to submit to change, any change, because we see it as inevitable? The societies we live in today are without doubt and profoundly the results of those earlier revolutions. But they are also the results of the struggles of workers to organise themselves against the mill owners and all those who enjoyed a disproportionate consumption of what they produced.

Disparity in wealth is growing in our societies once again. We are told that this is inevitable because technological development is racing forward, and these social changes are the natural consequence. This seems to presuppose that technological development is on a linear trajectory, that it is heading for some focused point in the future. As if it has a life of its own, and not the life that we give it. What is this technological development for? Is it an end in itself? What is the point of technology unless it benefits us? Not just a small portion of humanity, but everyone.

Increasingly I have begun to appreciate the wisdom that there may be in Frank Herbert’s Butlerian Jihad. What is the point of allowing – or, more accurately working to bring about – a way of being that is going to be disastrous for us? We are being told that the machines we are building are going to replace doctors and lawyers. That they are going to write books and compose music. Do we really want to build machines that will live our lives for us?

(I wrote this on the 3rd March 2015, but didn’t feel like publishing until now)

mirror mirror on the wall

Ricardo on 17th November 2014

ricardo pinto face showing natural asymmetry

ricardo pinto with right hand side of face reflected — two rights—cooler?

ricardo pinto with left hand side of face reflected — two lefts—warmer?

Mirrors have a sinister reputation that I feel is well deserved. I may have an explanation as to why this may be so – and it has nothing to do with Narcissus!

Meanings of the word ‘sinister’ – like ‘misleading’, ‘intending to deceive’, ‘dishonest’ – as well as those that have to do with the ‘left’, particularly the left hand side of the body – can be applied to mirrors with some justification. For a start, mirrors swap left and right. Among representations we encounter of ourselves – photographs, video, portraits – it is only in a mirror that we will see ourselves right/left reversed. Perhaps for film stars and models, with their characteristically symmetrical faces, this may appear to be of little consequence, but for the rest of us the face we see in the mirror is not the face that other people see when they look at us.

Bizarrely, the face we see in a mirror is a ‘secret face’ that others only ever see if they are standing beside us. It is as secret as the portrait of Dorian Gray. Though our secret face may not present to us a corrupted soul, I believe I can show you that it is still peculiarly strange.

The hemispheres of our brains are not identical. There is a mountain of evidence that each hemisphere perceives the world in quite a different way. The right hemisphere, controlling the left eye, directs our attention. It takes in the totality of our visual field, and is particularly interested in perceiving emotion. The left hemisphere, controlling the right eye, only properly sees the right side of anything. Additionally, we know that it is the left side of a face that is more involved in emotional expression. This may be why we tend to cradle a baby to our left, in the direct view of our right hemisphere, and so as to bring the most expressive half of our face to the baby’s attention. All of this has interesting implications for what happens when we look at ourselves in a mirror.

Our brain reacts to our reflection as it would to looking at any other person. However, unlike any real person, our reflection has its right and left reversed. Guided by the right hemisphere, our brain will seek out our reflection’s left side – except that our reflection’s left side is actually a reflection of our right. We are thus deceived into perceiving the emotionally less expressive side of our face as if it were the most expressive. The left hemisphere, registering only the right of whatever it is looking at through the right eye, sees not, as it would with every other person you have ever met, the emotionally expressive left side of our face, but the less expressive right side, the side that it controls.

Given all of this, is it any surprise that we should find mirrors sinister? We look into them imagining we are seeing ourselves as others see us, and instead see someone who is unlike anyone else we have ever seen, someone subtly alien.

*When I took this photograph on my Mac using Photo Booth, I noticed that the corner of the painting behind me was on the ‘wrong’ side, and discovered that Photo Booth – unlike every other camera I’ve come across – mirrors the image it takes. A quick investigation suggested that apparently Apple do this so that their users will feel that their ‘selfies’ are a good likeness. An interesting confirmation of one of the arguments in this post.

a related post
the curse of mirrors and photographs

false dawns

Ricardo on 28th October 2014

To anyone worried about climate change the announcement by Lockheed Martin that it is developing a fusion reactor that will be ready for market within ten years could be seen as a cause for hope. Though I’ve yearned for this development for years, now I’m not so sure.

Our technologies are causing ecological degradation and climate change. But what is technology except an amplifier of the effects that our minds have on the world? It is what we desire and believe that is the ultimate cause. Our inability to moderate our desires, and our false beliefs are, through technology, writ large on the life, substance and natural systems of this planet. No technological fix can fix our lack of wisdom. If through technology we manage to avoid a looming disaster this will only encourage ‘business as usual’. Fusion might save us from climate change, but at the price of turbo-charging our despoiling of the Earth’s resources, our extermination of its other creatures and ecosystems. Even were we to find a way of surviving without these, they would be an incalculable loss.

Perhaps the solution to the Fermi Paradox is that any species acquiring godlike power without godlike wisdom destroys itself. The path we must follow is not that of conquering Nature, but is that of trying to understand her. This may not be the flashy, exhilarating rollercoaster ride that we have been on since at least the Industrial Revolution – and whose ultimate destination has become for many the stupendous godlike existences promised to us by some sci-fi writers. But then it is looking likely that rollercoaster rails are going to run out somewhere not very far ahead.

Seeking after wisdom is a path we have walked before. Everywhere and at all periods, people – sometimes whole societies – have attempted to walk it. It is true that many versions of this path were mixed up with metaphysical conjectures. In the face of Science, these religions clung to their imagined metaphysics, and so consigned their whole project to ruin. Science is a better tool for finding out about the universe than our imaginations. It is not however sufficient to tell us about ourselves, and has been admitting to that for some time now. Uncertainty principles, emergent properties of complexity, chaos theory are Science showing us its limits. The best instrument that we have for probing the mind’s complexities and possibilities, and exploring how we should live harmonious lives, is the mind itself. Science is advancing our understanding of reality and, through that understanding, is giving us ever more power. What is increasingly obvious is that we are not using much of that power wisely. Would it not make sense to set aside those powers that we are not yet wise enough to use without harming our world or ourselves?

A characteristic of our age is the speed of change. Why are we in such a hurry? If the rollercoaster is heading for disaster, why not get off and walk? We would be on a slower path, but a surer one. If we give ourselves the time, Earth could be a paradise. And however long it takes, we will be happily occupied: science and the exploration of our psyches are unending quests.

Daoism’s Uncarved Block and the state of our world

Ricardo on 20th October 2014

The Dao De Jing, the ‘bible’ of Daoism, in various places refers to the Uncarved Block that loses something essential when it is carved. The Uncarved Block could be a baby free to become any version of themselves before their upbringing, their experiences and the culture they are raised in ‘carve’ them into the person that they grow up to be. (This interpretation resonates with a previous exploration of how a thought remains fluid until it is expressed.)

Daoism seems to be advising that it would be better for the carver to leave the Uncarved Block alone. What could be wrong with the carver trying to impose on the block a form they have in their mind? Well, for one thing, the carver is unlikely to fully know the role the block was performing in its uncarved state. For another, the carver cannot be aware of all the consequences that may result from the block being in the new form that they have given it.

Another interpretation of the Uncarved Block is that it represents Nature in the raw. In that case, the Dao De Jing may be telling us something important about what we can see happening all around us. When we act we change not only the thing that we are trying to change, but also make changes that we do not intend – with unforeseen consequences. When these unforeseen consequences are not to our liking, we often take further action to try and correct what we dislike. This leads in turn to more unforeseen consequences. One change at a time, we move the system – most pertinently ‘our world’ – away from the state of (relative) equilibrium that we found it in. Even if we were to reach a new state of equilibrium, how probable is it that this will be to our liking? And if this were not, Daosim would seem to be suggesting that there would be no way back (at least in the lifetime of our species).

In view of these considerations, a belief that we can sort out the problems we have created, by relying on further action, might be not optimism but an unwise gamble.

edited by James Worrall

the intelligence trap

Ricardo on 26th September 2014

Many believe that human intelligence has escaped the gravity well of ‘animal stupidity’, and that now we roam an unlimited space of thought where everything must eventually come within our understanding. Beneath this belief lies another: that humans are set apart from other animals – an idea that may be an expression of species neuroticism, and that finds its clearest expression in many religions. This special pleading has been eroded by the discoveries of science, and it is not hard to make an argument that brings humans firmly back to where they belong: amongst their fellow creatures.

If we are just animals, then it is hard to argue that our intelligence is of a distinct order when compared to that of other animals. What seems more plausible is that we lie towards one end of a spectrum of intelligence (or perhaps at one corner of a shape of many dimensions, because it seems unlikely to me that intelligence is purely linear). If this is true, then the limitation in intelligence that we perceive in other animals must imply that we too have such a limit. It seems obvious to us that an ape is never going to be able to play chess. What is less obvious is that a game could exist that we could not play, never mind one that, like the ape, we would not even recognise to be a game at all. If, as we believe, there are aspects of the world that an ape cannot comprehend, there might exist aspects of the world, of the cosmos, that similarly lie beyond the limit of our comprehension.

No doubt we will attempt to escape any limit to our intelligence. Evolution, natural or accelerated, might raise that limit. Technological enhancement might raise it even higher. However, it seems to me that the only plausible way to burst through it altogether might be for us to build an artificial intelligence. An artificial intelligence whose limit was however marginally higher than ours, must lead to an infinite progression of further intelligences – each raising the intelligence limit of the next. But there is a caveat. Considering the difficulties we have been experiencing in understanding how consciousness emerges from our brains, it might just be that all of these strategies lie beyond the limit of our intelligence. If this is true, then we are doomed to remain trapped within that limit without the possibility of escape.

edited by Phil Mochan

anchoring digital texts

Ricardo on 23rd September 2014

A core advantage of digital texts over printed ones is that they remain fluid. Printing a digital text fixes it like a fly in amber. However, a text that exists entirely in a digital form is vulnerable to change, whether accidental or deliberate. If a time came when a printed copy of Moby Dick no longer existed, there would be nothing to stop the integrity of that text being degraded. Even if an accurate digital transcription of Moby Dick survived, how could we tell which of various versions it was? We could no longer be confident that we had what Herman Melville wrote. Of course, to avoid this sort of loss, we could ensure that all digital texts exist somewhere in a printed form. Physical texts only existing in a few locations alas perish: how many texts have survived from the Library of Alexandria, or the great libraries in medieval Bagdad? We could try and avoid this kind of loss by printing large numbers of a given text and distributing these widely. But are we not here describing the world of paper books that we are presently beginning to replace with digital texts? And if we were to seek to keep a few printed copies we might archive them away in library analogs to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. But how useful would such library vaults be? To remain safe and secure, they must be inaccessible and, even with machine reading, it would be hard to remotely compare a digital text with its archived printed version, and thus ascertain the authenticity of that digital text.

A possible solution might be to store copies of each digital text in a digital format and within a read-only device. Such devices could be connected to the internet for access by anyone wishing to validate their copy of a given text, or else the archived text could be served up directly from the read-only device to remote readers. Multiple copies of the certified text could exist in several read-only devices that, connected to each other, would regularly perform a ‘checksum’ to preserve the archived text against tampering.

the Scottish Referendum and the community of Britain

Ricardo on 18th September 2014

The community of Britain and Northern Ireland, formed by hundreds of years of intermarriage and shared history, is too strong to be broken by Scottish independence. It seems likely to me that all that such independence would be is a ‘coup’ whereby the northern part of that community wrests back some of the political power that is increasingly concentrated in London. Before the north of Britain was deindustrialized, power and wealth was more equitably shared among its people. The resources that would fall under the control of an independent Scottish government would not be being removed from Britain, they would merely no longer be controlled from London. If this were to result in Scotland becoming richer – and thus the rest of what is currently termed the UK poorer, this is only a redistribution of wealth to the benefit of the northern part of the community of Britain. I do not believe that anyone in Scotland would wish to exclude anyone else in the community of Britain from coming to share in that prosperity. If this were to lead to more jobs in the north, and to fewer of the young people there feeling that they must move south to seek a decent standard of living, then this would be all to the good. If this were to lead to house prices rising in the north, and perhaps falling somewhat in the south – or merely stop pulling away from the rest of Britain, then this would be all to the good. It might be that all that will be seen to have happened is that some power has been wrested from Westminster and the south of Britain and located further north, and this too would be all to the good. As for the predictions of economic disaster, wherever such might fall, it seems to me that over centuries UK PLC has demonstrated that it is adaptable and capable of maintaining the coherence of its economy through many challenges. If the Scottish people vote for independence, UK PLC will still need to function. It will profit no part of the community of Britain if another part of that community were to fail. We will all have to pull together as we have done for centuries – why should that change? What will have changed is that power and wealth will no longer be concentrated in the south, but distributed more equitably throughout these islands. The politicians whose miscalculation will have allowed this ‘coup’ to succeed will pay the price. The community however will continue to prosper merely under different management.

Syrian children

Ricardo on 3rd April 2014

A Crusader castle is the latest victim of the Syrian civil war, but the damage to Syrian children may leave a more permanent wound.

When some ancient site or remains are damaged by conflict, by the encroachment of habitation or industry, I feel sad at what may be lost. I felt sad when I heard about the looting of the museum in Bagdad, and a few days ago when I became aware that the Crusader castle of Krak des Chevaliers in Syria had been damaged by an air strike. When I was younger, I had a cavalier attitude that people are replaceable, but ancient remains are not. I no longer value the living less than the memory of the dead. Krak des Chevaliers is bound to crumble away eventually. The damage from this air raid adds to its history, and, given who it was built by and why, it will stand as an even more imposing witness to human violence**.

The damage to the more vulnerable bodies of the Syrians in their civil war must be a greater loss for the present, than the loss of the castle might be for the future. I can’t help wondering if the longest lasting damage of all is that being inflicted on the psyches of the children who will survive the conflict. In my experience, the younger a child is who experiences trauma, the deeper will be the effects on the adult. That adult will pass on some of that trauma to the world through his or her life, and in turn often will pass on some to his or her children. And so the poison flows down through generations.

Through years of therapy I have striven to stem the flow of some damage I received in childhood, damage that must be mild in comparison to what many Syrian children are receiving today. As long as we permit such violence to be done to the young, its poison will continue to accumulate in our societies, and violence will beget violence. Early prevention is easier and more effective than later attempts at a cure.

*An image grab taken from a video uploaded on Youtube on July 12, 2013 shows smoke billowing from the Crusader castle Krak des Chevaliers after allegedly being shelled by government forces in Syria’s central Homs province.
**as do the Buddhas of Bamiyan

when LEGO lost faith

Ricardo on 2nd April 2014

I believe that LEGO is a toy/tool that once allowed children to build models at a sweet spot intermediate between thought and physical reality, and that, by losing faith in that breakthrough, the company has lost its way.

LEGO as I knew it as a child consisted of simple bricks. Complexity was achieved by assembling bricks, rather than being inherent in individual bricks. (Admittedly, the purity of this abstraction was somewhat broken by angled ‘roof tiles’ and windows – and there were also wheels and even motors for trains – but the core paradigm was that complex structures were assembled from simple, modular components.) The company departed from this paradigm, and began locating complexity within the components. Kits today consist of many special parts, and the models that can be achieved are variations on a form that must lie within the constraints of the kit’s design. A child’s freedom to invent and explore is thus restricted.

As a child I also played with Meccano, a toy whose paradigm was much closer to physical reality. LEGO has moved ever closer to that paradigm. A friend* claims that the reason that LEGO did this was to overcome the limitations of their previous system. My response was that it was these very limitations that gave LEGO its unique value. Those limitations forced solutions to be sought on a level more abstract than the physical. Before the Digital Revolution, LEGO was already a digital system (Meccano was essentially analog). It may not be surprising that many architects** who played with LEGO as children have admitted the debt that they owe to it – some to Meccano too. What may be a tad more surprising is that when I studied mathematics my understanding of numbers, of cartesian co-ordinates, even of set theory was informed by the way the ‘LEGO process’ had influenced my brain. That same influence informs how I ‘build’ texts. It is unlikely that LEGO had this influence only on me.

It is possible that, as some computer games are claimed to do, the more abstract LEGO specifically exercises sub-systems of the human brain. Its digital quality, and its orthogonality, are suggestive of left hemisphere brain function. Nevertheless, LEGO is no longer the unique ‘brain-tool’ that it once was.

PS did LEGO help bring about the Digital Revolution?

PPS if old LEGO is like painting, new LEGO is like collage?

*This post emerged out of a discussion with my friend, James Worrall.
**Including, it turns out, my friend the architect Richard Murphy

Author: Ricardo

China’s One Child Policy

do we need a Butlerian Jihad?

mirror mirror on the wall

false dawns

Daoism’s Uncarved Block and the state of our world

the intelligence trap

anchoring digital texts

the Scottish Referendum and the community of Britain

Syrian children

when LEGO lost faith

latest posts

the ubiquity of new ideas

the limits of the human artspace

is the AI the artist?

industrialised creativity and valueless abundance

genes as prime numbers

hermitabroad topics

latest posts

hermitabroad topics

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