Embracing Chaos

This last week there was a lot of news coverage of a "daring hostage rescue in Columbia."  Fifteen people were freed from the FARC.  Many had been held captive for years, including politician Ingrid Betancourt, and three Americans.  The press has been celebrating the victory along several lines.  How wonderful it is for these people to be set free after years of captivity.  How the US military helped plan and support the operation.  How the guerrillas were fooled into giving the hostages up without firing a single shot.  (Aren’t we smart!  Aren’t they stuipd?)

But there’s a dark side to this rescue that I haven’t seen anybody discuss.  The reason the guerrillas allowed those hostages to get on that helicopter without firing a shot because they thought it was operated by a humanitarian group.  It’s true that the operation relied on intercepted communications and a spy in the FARC’s command structure.  But the operation relied on a having military helicopter painted white and its crew claiming to be apolitical.  The press even describes the acting lessons the soldiers took to pretend to be NGO workers.  Oh those foolish rebels who fell for such a simple trick by trusting aid workers.  What dupes!

Now look at this from another angle.  Imagine you really are an NGO worker, trying to provide some kind of support service to remote Columbia.  How does knowledge of an operation like this make you feel?  Scared, probably.  From now on, rebels are going to doubt the legitimacy of all NGO workers.  They might think you’re in the Columbian military trying to take advantage of them again.  They might even start shooting down Red Cross helicopters.  The negative externality of this rescue is that all legitimate humanitarian work in the area has just gotten a lot more difficult and dangerous.

So as Santos brags that this rescue "will go down in history for its audaciousness and effectiveness" he ignores the fact that he just cashed in a bunch of good will to make this happen.  This stuff doesn’t grow easily like coca plants.  I’m glad those people have their lives back, but I am in no way convinced it was worth the sacrifice.  What’s going to happen next time there’s a public health crisis in the area?  The moral calculus is undoubtedly complex.  But ask yourself, would you trade the freedom of a dozen captives (including three Americans) for risking the well-being of many thousands of needy individuals?  How about for the lives of a half dozen International Red Cross workers murdered by suspicious rebels?

My 14-year old Subaru is on its way out, and since I’m commuting to Kirkland almost every day I really need a new car.  Primary criteria for me are safety and fuel economy / ecological impact.  Safety seems to correlate very strongly with model year so I’m looking at new cars.  In theory running on bio-diesel gives your car essentially zero net carbon impact.  Also, many new renewable organic fuel sources seem to be more like diesel than gasoline.  So I looked at what diesel cars can be purchased new in the US these days.  I was amazed at how slim the choices are.  If you want a new diesel vehicle in this country, here are your choices…

• Pickup trucks — many models, small and large
• Full-sized vans — think church-group van or delivery van, not soccer-mom minivan
• Mercedes — 3 models: E-class sedans, R-class station wagons, and GL-class or M-class SUVs.  All $45k+
• Volkswagen Taureg 2 — VW’s SUV has a diesel option starting at $68k
• Jeep Grand Cherokee — starting at $37k for diesel

Color me underwhelmed.  I might have missed something, but as far as I can tell there is exactly one non-SUV non-pickup diesel car on the market in this country: the Mercedes E-class.  Yowza.   Seriously, what gives?

In Europe, diesel cars are totally common-place.  While here we’re all abuzz about our fancy hybrids that can get 40+ mpg, Europeans can choose cars like the Citroen C4 which gets 46 38 mpg city and 71 59 mpg on the highway!  [Correction: These are per imperial gallon, which are 1.2 US gallons.]  I drove a Citroen (might even have been a C4) from Paris to Tuscany and back a couple of summers ago.  Let me assure you these are not stereotypically crappy French-engineered clunkers, but actually pretty nice cars, and not old-world tiny either. 

That number bears repeating.  71 59 miles per gallon on the highway.  When is this country going to get it together and raise the CAFE standards in a meaningful way and not just for show?  It’s for everybody’s good.

[Photo courtesy of Robert Candelori]

Here’s the scene: It’s 1:30 PM.  In 30 minutes the CEO of your company starts a conference call with analysts to announce quarterly earnings.  PR told you he is going to tell the Wall Street analysts how cool your team’s website is.  It is quite a success — in 18 months it has rocketed from non-existence to the world’s fourth most popular site in a very competitive industry.  Sounds great to get some recognition, right?  Only problem is, today your site’s kinda broken.

The night before a database upgrade got confused half-way through with no possibility to roll back.  One of the two production databases got upgraded to the new schema and the other didn’t.  As you’d spent most of the day diagnosing, the new schema didn’t quite work with your app — some fraction of pages generated from this database came out wrong.  Busted.  Missing.  Scrambled.  Paper white.  Ugh.

After hours of group futzing between you and a couple dozen other folks, you’ve managed to get the problem mitigated.  Your app now appears to be reliably generating correct non-borked pages.  But the site that the world sees is still messed up, because of your content distribution network (CDN) partner.  The CDN caches copies of your site across the world, moving it closer to customers for faster display and reducing the load on your own app servers.  But over the course of the day, the CDN has cached copies of many broken pages.  You can of course clear the individual cache for any broken page you find, causing the CDN to fetch a clean accurate copy from your app servers.  But the site has millions of pages — how are you ever going to find all the pages that need flushing?  With 30 minutes until press time it’s not impossible. 

The only reliable way to clear all the broken pages out of the cache is to wipe clean the whole CDN cache.  Push the big reset button.  This is a fairly big deal because it means millions of cached pages will have to be wiped from the CDN and fetched from the app servers again.  Is there time before the peering eyes of Wall Street come looking?  Clearing the caches takes about 15 minutes.  Filling them back up again — who knows.  The popular stuff will fill in fast, but the long tail will probably take a while.

To make it worse, clearing those caches will mean a big increase in traffic to the app servers.  You’ve hit the button before during code releases.  But always very late at night when traffic is light.  Early afternoon is about as high as traffic gets.  These systems are not the most stable in the world right now — you’re not sure if they’ll survive a cache clear in the middle of the afternoon.  Any web site will slow down with lots of traffic.  But too much traffic and these systems crash.  Break.  Stop working at all.  And often won’t get back up without a lot of help.  Sometimes such crashes will ripple back through dependent systems and it takes hours to figure out what’s happened.  Maybe even take the whole company off-line for a while, and that’s always fun to explain to the execs afterwards.

This is the risk of hitting the big button and clearing the caches.  Best case is the site runs slowly for a while as the caches repopulate.  Worst case, the whole system goes completely south while the analysts are checking it out.  Alternately you could just leave the site in its somewhat-broken but mostly working state for the analysts to look at.

So, what do you do?

A friend from college pointed out to me that engineers get paid for their judgment.  Doing rote calculations doesn’t demand a high salary.  Using your experience and opinion to weigh alternatives does.  Considering the relative merits of trade-offs, especially when the stakes are high — that’s where you really need somebody who is wise and experienced.

I have to digress for a moment to consider what’s really going on here when I say "the stakes are high."  In this industry, a big stupid mistake where you muck with live running machinery that you shouldn’t be means thousands of people don’t get their web page for a while.  Compare this to a friend who makes cheese for a living, and mucked around with live running machinery and got badly hurt.  A mistake on the production web servers potentially could have destroyed millions of dollars of abstract shareholder value.  But nobody was going to get their arm ripped off.  (Warning — these pictures are really gross.)  Anyway…

So what did I do when faced with this dilemma recently?  Me?  I went for it — I hit the button.  And everything was fine.  For a while the site was really slow while the caches refreshed.  Many CPUs were pegged from our app tier back through the databases that the whole company relies on.  But nothing broke.  And when pages finally loaded they looked good.  After about an hour, everything was back to normal.  Most everybody never noticed a thing. 

Just another exciting, adventurous, yet entirely unglamorous day in the life of a software engineer.

I generally find CES exhausting.  It’s amazing how far you have to walk to get anywhere in Vegas.  It’s about a half mile walk from the hotel lobby to the elevators to get to your room.  And there’s this inflation field caused by everybody living on an expense account — $4 for a small bottle of water or $10 for a small sandwich.  It’s worse than an airport. 

So while I’m always happy to go there and get some  hands-on market research and competitive analysis done, or try to close some deals with partners, I’m also generally just as happy to go home.  This year, I didn’t even cruise the show at all, except to go between our booth and conference rooms, which was fine with me.  Until I got home and saw pictures like this…

CES 2007 was the unveiling of the prototype hardware for Nick Negroponte’s $100 laptop, now called XO (or is it OX?), and delivered under the program "One Laptop Per Child" or OLPC. 

I absolutely love this initiative.  I consider contributing to it to be one of the most moral things anybody can do with their lives.  It is one of the only means I can foresee that could help bring the continent of Africa out of poverty — pure grass roots education.  A life goal of mine is to try to help enable children’s education to be limited only by their talent and motivation, not by their surroundings.  OLPC is trying to do this.  Someday soon I hope to help.

I’m a little slow to re-report this, but but I find it fascinating so I want to share it in case you missed it.  New York City has banned the use of trans-fats in restaurants.  They’ve done this almost completely (a few exceptions for things like donut shops) and very quickly (by middle of next year) and extremely decisively.

I find this amazing for a couple of reasons.  First, it drives home the artificial nature of trans-fats.  I’ve thought of them as similar to saturated fats in a lot of ways — things that are everywhere but should be avoided.  But thinking about what it would mean to not use them in a restaurant makes clear that they’re not so omnipresent.  No crisco vegetable shortening, and no margarine.  Other than that, what ingredients have trans fats in them?  Partially hydrogenated vegetable oil — I’ve never used that.  Have you?

I do want to mention olive oil a bit.  Olive oil is primarily a monounsaturated fat, which is a very healthy kind of oil.  Heating a monounsaturated oil like can turn it into a trans-fat.  Some have concluded from this that cooking with olive oil is unhealthy, and I admit I’ve spread this rumor too.  But from the little research I’ve managed to dig up (1, 2) this process doesn’t occur enough to be a real issue in traditional cooking settings.  I will say this research is thin and minds may change.

I’d like to say a bit about the chemistry involved here.  Trans-fats refers to the configuration of carbons on either side of a double-bond, or a place where the fat is unsaturated — it’s a trans rather than a cis configuration.  Cis fats have marked bends, while trans fats have kinks in otherwise straight chains. I’m guessing the reduced mobility of the unsaturated fats caused by
their bends are related to their health benefits, but I’m not sure.  Here are two monounsaturated fats, in cis and trans forms:

Cis fatty acid: oleic acid

Trans fatty acid: elaidic acid

Also, most of what I’ve been reading assumes that hydrogenation is the only way that trans fats can occur, which is wrong.  Industrial hydrogenation converts unsaturated double-bonds to single bonds, preferentially in the trans configuration.  But other chemical processes can do this too.  Cows naturally produce small quantities of trans fats.

This law is a great example the government taking a broader interest in society values than any individual constituent would.  The government pays for health care, so in this case they do have a direct interest in improving public health, and will likely see a benefit from this, so it’s not a perfect example of the principal I’m expounding.  In general, I think it’s the government’s responsibility to legislate things that are for the "long-term good of society" (in quotes because I recognize that it’s hard to define or agree upon).  This burden falls uniquely on the government when there’s nobody else who clearly benefits from this kind of legislation.  Environmental protection is a classic example of this — do things that won’t directly help us or our kids but rather our great grand-kids.  The Lorax spoke for the trees for the trees had tongues.  Today, NGOs tend to do that speaking, and sometimes the government listens.  I’m surprised, impressed and proud of New York for this bold move!

Some people complain that the holidays have become too commercial.  That the holiest of christian holidays has become an excuse to accumulate material things, and that the true meaning, whatever that was, is being lost.

I disagree.  I think now is the time to

Buy More Stuff!

I have to give props out to all my friends who have been dutifully going down to Westlake center on the weekends to spread the good word.  Someday soon I hope to have time to join them.

The only thing that really surprises me about this is that some (clearly unamerican) people argue with them.  My friends have gotten into prolonged arguments with shoppers and other passersby who don’t like the message they’re  spreading.  My friends retort with "How could you possibly tell your family and friends that you love them except by buying them more stuff?"  But even this doesn’t persuade those who are persistently disturbed by this message.

Maybe someday they’ll get it.  But I’m not holding out much hope.

Transhumanist Morality is the idea that we should
consider the impact of our actions in the context of the millennium-scale history
of humanity. Specifically, I think the
only way we will avoid some kind of dystopian apocalyptic fate is by seeking
salvation through technology.

In this context, moral actions are those that increase the
probability that as a species we achieve technological salvation before we blow
ourselves up. I’d like to explore what
this means in very practical terms by analyzing a number of jobs I’ve had and
considered and seen my friends do over the years.

SEO for e-Commerce

I once seriously considered a job doing Search Engine
Optimization for an e-Commerce company. They offered me truckloads of money to get their web pages to the top of
the google rankings. The work would have
been technically fascinating, but I ended up rejecting the job largely on moral
grounds. I just couldn’t feel good
about the work I’d be doing.

Even without a transhuman perspective, this job clearly has a zero-sum impact on society. Reverse-engineering pagerank isn’t actually building value. Move sales away from other companies and
towards your own only has a positive impact on society if you genuinely believe
your company is creating more value for the consumer than your competitors
do. This kind of corporate
righteousness is dangerous and I just didn’t believe it.

Pure marketing efforts like SEO might as well be selling
used-cars for all the good it has on the long-term story-arc of humanity.

Electronic Music Systems

While at first blush this might seem trivial, I actually do
consider this work (my current primary employment) to be moral from a
transhuman perspective.

Making it easier for people to consume music they love makes
their leisure time more efficient and effective. This makes people happier. Following the logic of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human needs, happy people
have more energy to devote to other causes. So by making people happier, I’m creating more capacity to solve the
meaningful problems. It’s an indirect
effect, but I think it is helping.

A reasonable counter-argument to this is that great creativity
often seems to come from the emotionally tortured, especially in the fine
arts. But I don’t think this pattern
holds up for great scientists and engineers.

Direct Political Activism

There are many reasons to consider the current political
regime in the US immoral from a transhuman perspective. The war on terror stands a chance of cutting
this whole conversation short by achieving the dystopian outcome in this
generation. Stifling stem-cell research
is directly preventing technological advancement. Regressive judgmental social policies like discrimination based
on sexual preference makes many people miserable and stifles creativity per the
earlier Maslow argument. This
government is certainly doing plenty to bring about the eventual destruction of
our technologically advanced society.

But the pendulum of politics swings very naturally back and
forth.  (As evidenced by last week’s election.)  Convincing a few people to
change their votes really doesn’t matter much because the aggregate political
mood has a will of its own. Trying to
alter that will by changing fundamental systems like openness of the press or
campaign funding policies or society’s sense of engagement in politics is
definitely more worthwhile since that work is better leveraged. But working on kicking out the current
damaging regime is a short-term fix that will just get undone after another
political cycle. There is a small
chance that kicking them out prevents catastrophe, and for that reason it’s
worthwhile, but I still haven’t lost my faith in the checks and balances in the
whole system.

Renewable Energy

Running out of energy resources is one easy-to-foresee way
that our advanced society could collapse. As such, work on renewable energy helps to delay or even prevent this
set of doomsday scenarios.

This work is decidedly moral because it extends our runway
giving us longer to do what we need to before things go seriously south. This provides an indirect linear improvement
in the situation. Indirect because it’s
only addressing one possible set of doomsday scenarios. Linear because it’s directly combating the
problem directly – it’s not clear how good work here enables faster development
of good work in other areas.  But this definitely helps.

Research into Neuroscience, Robotics, Computational Linguistics, etc

These and other fields offer great promise in the near term
to advance technology in the direction of technological salvation. A confluence of these technologies with a
few that we don’t understand yet have the potential to realize various scifi
visions of overcoming the physical limitations that will otherwise painfully
drag us back to a more primitive existence.

As such, work in these fields is directing helping to solve
the problem. This is highly moral
work.  It is leveraged in that these advances will spur other advances.

Working on Internet Explorer or Google

Almost 10 years ago I got to contribute in a very small way to IE5.  Back then browsers were still evolving quickly.  It’s not as clear of the value or working on Firefox today, but back then building better browser technology was one of the most
direct contributions to increased human intelligence. Today the best analogy would probably be working on search for Google or MSN.  The ubiquitization of the internet has dramatically improved
people’s ability to solve complex problems quickly. I really don’t know what technological salvation will involve,
but I am sure that getting there will require solving a great many complex
problems.

Work like this that facilitates human communication and
problem solving is extremely moral. By
facilitating all forms of problem-solving, it is accelerating the pace of
advancement in nearly every other field we can consider. This kind of exponential growth is what
we’re gonna need to avoid the bad scenarios.

e-Learning

Electronic learning systems have the potential to improve
the quality of education for everybody everywhere. This means enabling people to better solve complex problems in a
very direct way: they’re smarter.

I firmly believe that the next decade is going to see a
revolution in education at all levels. The net result will be an educational system which is extremely
meritocratic, enabling anybody who is motivated to achieve intellectual skills
close to their full intrinsic potential. A smarter population will make solving every technological challenge in
the future easier. As such, I currently
don’t see any activity more moral than building electronic learning systems.

"May you live in interesting times."
    -Ancient Chinese Proverb (actually, it isn’t.)

The idea behind this saying is that times of rapid change are generally quite painful.  Historically interesting times are those involving wars and revolutions — things where lots of people die.  Growth and improvement have only come through very slow gradual change.  But in today’s China, this is anything but true.  Right now is one of the most interesting times in China’s long history, and for the majority of the country, it’s fantastic.  (If we all work hard, that kind of intersting time might be behind us.)

We read about how the Chinese economy is glowing red hot.  Their sustained GDP growth rate would make any head of a western central bank terrified.  In any established economy, a 9% annual growth rate would last maybe a couple years before it turned into inflation, recession or both.  But a very clever set of communist economists are managing to ride the bleeding edge of rapid growth far longer and further than I think anybody outside the country would have believed possible.  I’ve been reading these cold dry numbers in the same places you have.  But being here in China now, these numbers are very real.

Consider Shenzhen, just across the psuedo-international border with Hongkong.  Today Shenzhen’s greater metropolitan area has over 10 million people.  But just 28 years ago when Deng Xiaoping decided to start developing this city, it had but 25,000.  Imagine that — a city nearly the size of LA or NY that was consciously willed into existence in less then a generation.  It almost defies belief.

Having just left Shenzhen, I’m currently in Xiamen, which is the closest mainland city to Taiwan.  On a clear day like today, you can see outlying islands that are politically controlled by the Republic of China, the Taiwanese government.  There is a large and famous sign here pointed out towards Taiwan that reads "One Country, Two systems, Together One China."  The Taiwanese have a similar sign on the other side.

NPR recently aired a story about the northern border of North Korean.  There’s a theme park that is constantly empty and a small family whose job might be simply to picnic under an umbrella to demonstrate to the outside world how happy and successful the closed communist system in North Korea is.  Possibly for similar reasons, Xiamen also has a theme park on the coast facing Taiwan.  But its big roller coaster is occupied until 4:00 AM every night.  On weekends happy local families fill the beaches with their families.  I came here for a holiday 5.5 years ago during Spring Festival.  There are so many new buildings and bridges and tunnels and freeways that I hardly recognize it now.  Real estate prices boggle the mind in a way that only Manhattenites could imagine.  There is also a huge new "trourist ferry terminal" under construction here.  Its stated plans are for ferry service to Hong Kong and to host cruise ships.  The obvious long-term purpose of this project is in the fulfillment of that big red sign. 

Shenzhen is thriving as a psuedo-port for the reunification of Hong Kong.  I have no doubt that within 10 or 20 years, Xiamen will be doing the same with Taiwan.  All polluting factories have been ordered out of Xiamen in order to clean up the air.  The communists clearly want to make Xiamen attractive.  I used to buy in to the American political ideas that we must protect Taiwan from China’s oppressive government.  Taiwanese certainly used to look at it this way — a friend grew up there singing songs about how they would liberate the mainlanders from the communists.  But taking a longer term view of the situation, if I were a Taiwanese resident today, I would look forward to reunification with the world’s largest economy.

Again, talk about economics can easily obscure what’s really happening here.  Millions of people are graduating from poor subsistance lifestyles up to the comfort and safety of a working class life.  Or up to the relative luxury of a middle-class life.  Or even to the genuine luxury of being able to buy whatever they want — it’s not that uncommon here.  The difference in the quality of life of my friends and the other people I see here is obvious from just 5 years ago — be it having hot water in every room of the house, owning a car, or kite-surfing in their spare time.  These huge cities are physical manifestations of people’s lives being improved on a grand historic scale.  The excitement is palpable.  Positive energy infuses everything.  A note to Naomi Klein: this is what sweat-shops do to people’s lives.  These certainly are interesting times, and I feel priveledged to be able to experience them first-hand.

Ever wonder what Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay were saying to each other before it all fell apart?  Now you can read it for yourself.  Check out the Enron Explorer.  It lets you browse over 200,000 internal Enron e-mails.  It’s got a nifty java applet for exploring connections and even has shortcuts for interesting topics like the FBI and shredding.  Let’s hear it for information democracy!

Thanks to Charles Armstrong for putting this together.

I consider myself a transhumanist.  I spend probably too much time thinking about very long-terrm trends of humanity.  Some of the trends I see seem obvious to the point of being irrefutable, while others I’m sure are controversial.  Nevertheless, I’ll lay out a few of the basic tenants of transhumanism, and begin to explain why they lead to the very deep and personal implications they have for me.

Computers are getting faster and more powerful.  As they do so, they’re helping humans be smarter.  Maybe not invidual humans, as some studies have shown that things like e-mail and powerpoint can actually make people stupider for some definition.  I can see the truth in this by considering several very smart friends of mine who don’t actually remember their spouse’s cell phone numbers.  Because they don’t need to.  Their computer familiars remember these things for them — the external brain.  In combination we get smarter — the synergy of humans and computers or groups of humans connected through computers — whatever you want to call these aggregate life-forms, they are way better at solving difficult problems than any individual human was just 15 years ago, when there was little e-mail and no Google.  In just 15 years, we’ve seen massive improvements in our ability to solve problems!

Moreover, technological change is accelerating.  These changes aren’t going to stop until we have completely overcome biology.  Unless something horrible happens.  Which it could.  To be explicit, I see humanity facing two possible futures on the multi-century timescale:

• Enlightenment by transcending the limitations of biology through technology
• A dramatic, catastrophic, probably violent and painful return to a simpler way of life

Because of this, I feel a sense of transhumanist morality obliging me to dedicate my life’s work to striving for the first option: species-wide enlightenment through technology.

I plan on writing a lot more on this topic.  But I wanted to start by stating a thesis along with a few basic ideas.