[FRIAM] Selective cultural processes generate adaptive heuristics

[Steve Smith]

On 4/12/22 9:15 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Last Friday I was waiting to take a left across traffic.  There was a Muni train coming in my direction that was going to block my turn for a few seconds.  Rushing it was possible, but I had a passenger.  Also, I remembered the obscured downhill right lane I'd be entering had some row houses along it, and some street parking.   Accelerating hard into that lane could spook a pedestrian or someone getting into their car.  I could see this short delay was going to happen so as I slowed to a stop, while signaling, I tucked as close to the center as I could, with enough margin to avoid getting clipped by the wide Muni.  I did this so people behind me that wanted to go straight or take a right could do so if they were cautious to shimmy through.  But that wasn't good enough, and the person behind me started waving their hands and yelling at me. [1] In this case I thought the person behind me couldn't possibly miss the huge approaching Muni and would estimate the few seconds they could wait.   Somehow, there are drivers that really can't imagine that another driver is trying to help them or visualize even simple mechanics of a few moving objects.    They can only lay on their horn.    My dog has way more finesse in herding and pursuit situations.    So, yeah, there are things that will be tricky for a ML system to model that are semi-cognitive, but the bar for human drivers is pretty low.  A subset of city drivers are about as smart as insects -- all signaling, no lookahead, and no modeling.   At least autonomous driving systems will get far more scrutiny than your typical 16 year old and a DMV test.
>
> [1] Now I am a little ashamed to admit it, but in such circumstances, I have been known to take another block just to avoid holding anyone up, and then doubling back.   As I get older I see these situations as opportunities to frustrate people that deserve to be frustrated.

Marcus -

Well rendered stream-of-consciousness description of a familiar scene!  
It helped me recognize for myself how much I depend on other drivers 
being automatons while *I* attempt to get inside their heads and 
participate in a meta-dance which includes significant (over) 
politenesses... as with your trying not to startle any pedestrians, 
etc.   And of course, those other drivers who in their impatience 
project onto me what *they* would do in the same context and get 
irritable with me for not being more assertive in my decisions.

When first I began driving in big cities (especially West Coast) in my 
20s, I discovered that I *really enjoyed* the more fast paced, assertive 
milieu that was driving there.  I felt somewhat *freed* of worrying 
about other's reactions to me beyond the "dance at hand".   It was 
freeing to feel I could drive more *assertively* without feeling that I 
was being particularly *aggressive*.    Today it takes a little bit of 
emotional energy for me (esp after 2 years of lockdown) shift from the 
lackadaisackle style that rural and small-city driving yields to the 
more assertive urban style.   10 years ago I spent a month driving in 
Italy and found that while I coped well enough, I never quite found the 
rhythms, or maybe as I moved across the country, the local "dialects" of 
driving changed faster than I could keep up.   I might have enjoyed it 
more in my 20s/30s.

I find that professional drivers (OTR Truckers, buses, delivery persons, 
taxis) generally are more predictable in their driving habits and 
therefore easier for me to accommodate, even if/though I know sometimes 
that means *they* will be more assertive, forcing their way into traffic 
with the sheer force of their size/mass/confidence.  I expect that 
self-driving cars will also be in most ways easier to drive amongst than 
random hurried/angsty/altered human beings like me.

I rented a car from Portland to San Francisco about 3 years ago that had 
minimal collision avoidance features.   I forget what brand, maybe 
Ford.  It was one of those "involuntary upgrades" where because I was 
going one-way and they wanted to move this vehicle south, I didn't pay 
extra for the sporty-luxury model when I'd reserved a subcompact.   In 
any case, it had several features that surprised me, and mostly were 
helpful.   If I turned on my turn signal, the relevant side-mirror would 
flash an arrow to remind me I was about to turn or change lanes, but if 
there were a car in the lane I was changing into, it would flash red 
instead of amber.   In all cases, I already knew I didn't want to change 
lanes at that instant, but it was a nice reminder/confirmation that I 
was either signalling the person pacing me that I wanted over or that 
they should continue to overtake me so I could slip in behind them.   It 
had the same parking-proximity alerts my 2011 Volt has but also had a 
soft, rising chime that seemed calibrated to speed/distance when 
overtaking another car in my own lane... nothing offensive, again just a 
reminder that I was getting "into their space" which in all cases I 
already knew.  It was not overly intrusive and I adapted to it 
quickly.   If it had taken upon itself to reduce my cruise-control speed 
or even gently brake I might have fluidly felt I was merging my 
intentions with it's. In the extreme, it is possible that even if I 
stood on the gas trying to rear-end the vehicle in front of me, the car 
simply would not allow for that and I think I would be fine with that. 
As it is, the caster/camber in the front wheels helps to keep the car on 
the straight and narrow if I take my hands off of the wheel and the ABS 
brakes make it (trivially) easier to not go into an unintended 4 wheel 
skid.     The only feature that *didn't* work for me was that it somehow 
fused many things to decide that I might be getting tired and should 
take a break.   In a few cases, it was *right* and I was already 
planning a stop soon, but in some cases it just felt like a nag.   
Perhaps it was detecting some mildly erratic driving (perhaps driving 
under the speed limit without detected traffic?).

Chances are in 20 years I will be a dangerous, senile driver with a car 
so smart that together we won't be at all dangerous and the 16 year olds 
will be driving cars in a similar mode, are actually being *taught* to 
drive in the same way ML/AI are being taught by a huge ensemble of 
(experienced?) drivers today.   Or maybe I will spend my days entirely 
inside my VR goggles with electrostim/haptics giving my body enough 
exercise to keep supporting my brain until Elon Musk can upload me into 
a robotic device, most likely a microsat wandering (with great purpose) 
the asteroid belt, gathering up materials to build a Dyson Sphere to 
accommodate the trillions of human-bots swarming the solar system like 
the forever-living cockroaches we will have become?

Too much SciFi in my blood I am sure.  Romanticized alternatives to this 
dystopia might be more like: Drake Majistral 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Maijstral>  or Bruno de Towaji 
<http://www.wilmccarthy.com/tc.htm>  .


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam<friam-bounces at redfish.com>  On Behalf Of Steve Smith
> Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2022 7:07 PM
> To:friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Selective cultural processes generate adaptive heuristics
>
>
> On 4/12/22 5:10 PM, glen wrote:
>> Ha! 8^D
>>
>> But neither the ANN clone, nor the *stereotyped* heuristics generated
>> by an autonomous car capture the high-dimensional opportunity I
>> believe meat organisms experience. Yes, the subsequent evolution of
>> the ANNs and the stereotyped out-group are more concrete than most
>> synthetic minds. But my claim, were I to actually hold it and try to
>> state it more clearly, is that meat, living in meat space, is more
>> open than those 2 examples. It's the openness that provides the meat
>> with the opportunity. The ANNs and autonomous car are more fixed, more
>> closed.
>>
>> However, I do believe machine intelligence *will* reach meat
>> intelligence. But it'll have to look a lot more like meat intelligence
>> to do so. It's already looking a lot more like meat intelligence than
>> it was even 10 years ago. And if we stay at this supralinear rate (or
>> higher), it'll happen sooner than I, this meat bag, thinks.
> As a "meat bag" driving a car, I find myself *regularly* imagining what a driverless car would do in the current/instantaneous moment as I interrupt my own automatic driving instincts to run a supervisory analysis consciously to make sure that my instincts are doing "the right thing" which usually yields something like an infinite regress of second guessing which only ends/completes/halts because the clock runs out...
> the race condition converges between my reactions/instincts/conscious-review and the events-of-the-world.
>
> As I've had *very* few (but not-zero) out-of-control moments in a vehicle and as I write this, I feel like I should (if I could) collect up my most authentic memories of those moments and do some kind of meta-analysis of them.   What I have done in the moment (after the chaotic events returned to somewhat linear in my apprehension) is usually to peg some overly conservative heuristic over the top of my more regular suite of heuristics that seem to keep me on my own side of the road and maintaining appropriate speeds and yields in most contexts.   With time, the precedence of those heuristics fade or get papered over by "yet other" heuristics for various other competing goals (hurrying, staying entertained, testing my abilities, etc.).
>
> In any case, I have no trouble imagining the car I'm driving (with the mildest of safety features like sonar proximity alarms in bumpers for parking and "your turn-signal is on, dipshit" and automatic
> driving/headlamps) incrementally getting better and better at helping me drive until *I* am either letting it do the driving and running my "supervisory heuristics" as I observe and consider intervening, OR even just putting on my VR goggles and watching a movie or playing a game or hacking lamely at some code while the car drives me off a cliff. Chances are the ability of my car will exceed my ability as a highway/urban driver sometime before *I* become a radical hazard as a driver (NM DMV just allowed me to renew my DL for 8 years sight unseen).
>
> If my car emulates *my* style of driving (because it trains on my actual
> driving?) somewhere down the road (pun recognized but not intended), I can't even imagine what it would mean for it to have a subjective, conscious experience like my own, even if somehow there is a monitor running that layers in heuristics uncannily like the ones *I* paste up in my imagination. Of course, I *know* that a proper self-driving vehicle will be trained on some maximal ensemble of *good drivers* and not on my personal ideosyncratic style.  It might be different if it were training for Stock Car racing on a dirt track where my ideosyncracies might be somehow useful (or more likely entertaining).
>
> I don't know if anyone else has these kinds of self-reflective episodes about who we might (already) be becoming as the boundaries between our phenotypic selves and our techno-extended selves blur.   I have been riding a bicycle since I was about 4, a motorcycle since I was about 15, and driving a car since soon after that.   My entire CN system all the way out to the fine-structure is co-evolved with those activities, even though those devices didn't even exist until about 200 and 130 years respectively.  Yesterday I fumbled my newer, more manageable bicycle (as of 4 months ago) into a spill and though it has been a couple of decades since I fell off of a bike, it seems my CNS/muscle memory remembered how to fall yet better than it remembered how to not-fall.  Neolithic (or even mesolithic) hunters probably had an even more acute merging with their various tools than I have with my own (esp. vehicles, keyboards, tracking devices, hammers, chainsaws, alexa, siri ... ).
>
>
>> On 4/12/22 15:58, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>> Now it is entirely possible to take a massive pre-trained neural net
>>> like GPT3 and run it in two places at once or have different
>>> instances use a baseline and take divergent paths from different
>>> training.
>>> None of that is possible for humans, at least yet.    Some autonomous
>>> cars even know enough to be afraid of the police! (Regarding
>>> concreteness.)
>>> https://electrek.co/2022/04/10/gm-cruise-autonomous-taxi-pulled-over-
>>> by-police-in-san-francisco-without-humans-bolts-off-u-cruise-responds
>>> /
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Friam<friam-bounces at redfish.com>  On Behalf Of glen
>>> Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2022 3:47 PM
>>> To:friam at redfish.com
>>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Selective cultural processes generate adaptive
>>> heuristics
>>>
>>> Exactly. Both of these (low turnover wisdom propagation & "flat"
>>> infoscape) fail in my conception because they lack the concrete
>>> (definit) particulars. Even if we have one 400 year old vampire
>>> telling funny stories to a 30 year vampire about a now-exploded
>>> vampire from 700 years ago, the sheer *number* of anecdotes required
>>> to capture a 400 year lifespan *forces* some abstraction ... some
>>> leaving out of important detail.
>>>
>>> And even if the concrete details of why, say, Galileo was such an OCD
>>> journaling nerd can be found in biographies or whatnot, actually
>>> reading and learning about all the persnickety nonsense that was
>>> *crucial* to the arrival at, emergence of, any given inflection
>>> point, ... even if that concrete detail is logged/documented out
>>> there somewhere, nobody can learn it all. Each learner is forced to
>>> take an abstracted slice through it.
>>>
>>> What the commitment to meat space interactions is, is a way to ensure
>>> that the concreteness remains ... at least within *some* small "open
>>> ball", you're getting a high-dimensional opportunity. I think of it
>>> in terms of the space vs time tradeoff and (yes, broken record) the
>>> parallelism theorem. Sure, a sequential system can simulate a
>>> parallel one perfectly, but only if you give it the time to do so ...
>>> and the amount of time it takes to do it is related to the amount of
>>> space the parallel system uses. Another way to think of it is the
>>> project management triangle: cheap, fast, or good. But those are
>>> low-dimensional. The space being balanced by organisms in the world
>>> is high-dimensional.
>>>
>>> On 4/12/22 14:19, Steve Smith wrote:
>>>> Generations past (and under-mobile near-subsistence cultures today)
>>>> have more intergenerational households and neighborhoods providing
>>>> the heterarchical/holarchical connection/communication you suggest.
>>>> Or so my "just so" story relates.
>>>>
>>>> The expansive breadth offered by global (near-instantaneous, global)
>>>> communication/publication/relationship connections possibly makes up
>>>> for that in the large, a major refactoring of problems and solutions.
>>>>
>>>> I personally suffer from the lack of cross-cultural, cross-class
>>>> experience of frequenting a neighborhood "watering hole"
>>>> (pub/tavern/saloon) in the way Glen seems to enjoy (cultivate). My
>>>> oldest regular drinking-philosophy buddy would be over 110 today (he
>>>> died over 20 years ago from alcohol-related illness) and until about
>>>> 5 years ago I had a small cohort of 30ish imbibing interlocutors.  I
>>>> blame COVID, but the reasons are probably larger and more nefarious.
>>>
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