Category Archives: Science & Technology

The Devil’s Code

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The Devil’s Code by John Sanford was published in 2000. Fourteen years ago.

Clipper II was an Orwellian nightmare come true, a practical impossibility, or a huge joke at the taxpayers’ expense—take your pick. It was designed in response to a fear of the U.S. government that unbreakable codes would make intercept-intelligence impractical. And really, they had a point, but their solution was so draconian that it was doomed to failure from the start.

The Clipper II chip—like the original Clipper chip before it was a chip designed to handle strong encryption. If it was made mandatory (which the government wanted), everyone would have to use it. And the encryption was guaranteed secure. Absolutely unbreakable.

Except that the chip contained a set of keys just for the government, just in case. If they needed to, they could look up the key for a particular chip, get a wiretap permit, and decrypt any messages that were sent using the chip. They would thereby bring to justice (they said) all kinds of Mafiosos, drug dealers, money launderers, and other lowlifes.

For those too young to remember, the Clipper chip was a real thing. The NSA was a real thing as well.

Word got around, and the word was that the NSA was rapidly becoming obsolete. Once upon a time, agency operatives could tap any phone call or radio transmission in the world; they could put Mao Tse-tung’s private words on the president’s desk an hour after the Maximum Leader spoke them into his office phone; they could provide real-time intercepts to the special ops people in the military.

No more. The world was rife with unbreakable codes—any good university math department could whip one up in a matter of days. Just as bad, the most critical diplomatic and military traffic had come out of the air and gone underground, into fiber-optic cable. Even if a special forces team managed to get at a cable, messages were routinely encoded with ultrastrong encryption routines.

The NSA was going deaf. And the word was, they didn’t know what to do about it. They’d become a bin full of aging bureaucrats worried about their jobs, and spinning further and further out ot the Washington intelligence center.

And if the NSA was becoming obsolete, might their solution look something like what we have today?

Scott Adams: Immortality

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“The poor among us, and people with certain religious beliefs, will remain 100% human for as long as the more advanced beings – the cyborgs and robots – allow it. Life will be somewhat awkward when part of civilization is immortal and part is not. But the one thing we know for sure is that the richest cyborgs and robots will eventually consolidate power. For starters, only the people who have wealth will be able to afford the jump to immortality. So the first robots with human minds and the first immortal cyborgs will be rich. Just imagine how much money Larry Ellison will someday have if he stubbornly refuses to die and dilute his fortune across less-capable heirs. Eventually most of the world will be owned by five multi-trillionaire robots that live on yachts the size of Connecticut. The immortal cyborgs, with the limitations of their organic parts, will be mere millionaires who can’t stop complaining about “the Kevlar ceiling.”

“It’s hard to wrap your head around the idea that a digital representation of your mind, no matter how accurate, is still “you” in some sense. But I think that fear will go away as soon as we see the first robot that thinks and acts exactly like Uncle Bob did before he made the jump. If Uncle Bob the robot acts human enough, we’ll come to see him as the same entity that once inhabited an organic shell. When technology is sufficiently advanced, we’ll get past the magical thinking about spirits and souls and the specialness of having organic parts.”

Time Magazine

Scott Adams: Government transparency

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“Ninety percent of government corruption would disappear overnight if all government conversations were recorded.” Scott Adams imagines transparency on the workings of government:

“So let’s say government officials are required by law to hold work-related meeting in rooms that are wired to record everything happening. Every meeting would be encrypted and stored on government servers. One would still need a court order and a good reason to view any recordings, but I have to think it would keep most politicians from doing anything too outrageous. Even their phone calls would be recorded.”

Can I help you find something?

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I’m a big fan of UPS. Today a nice man delivered a parcel while I was in the front yard playing fetch with the dogs. He stopped for a moment to throw the ball and chat. I mentioned an article I’d read about how UPS uses sophisticated tech to find the shortest routes, etc.

The driver smiled and explained that UPS knows when his seat buckle is (and is not) buckled; when the door to the fan is open and for how long; and how often he back up, and at what speed. Every Monday morning he’s given a printout of this data.

I should add he didn’t seem to have a negative opinion about this.

Later in the day I was in Staples where it occurred to me that the people who work there (probably) get paid the same whether they are helping a customer… or doing nothing. Doing nothing is a less attractive option if a manager is about or, obviously, if the clerk is just eager to help customers.

Could a future AI monitor the in-store video of employees interacting with employees and reward those who spend more time helping customers than those who have developed the knack of avoiding them? The AI would be smart enough to know when the employee was bugging the shit out of a browser, just to game the system.

Before you ask, no, I don’t think I’d much like working in this environment. But I might like it better than being replaced by the friendly artifical person that will be rolling silently up and down the aisles in the near future.

Scott Adams: Virtual People

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“My generation is the last of the pure humans. Most people my age were raised with no personal technology. Someday historians will mark the smartphone era as the beginning of the Cyborg Age. From this day on, most kids in developed countries will be part human and part machine. As technology improves, we will keep adding it to our bodies.”

Scott Adams: Privacy

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“If you give up a little bit of privacy, the government owns you. But if you give up most of your privacy, the government loses its power over you.”

“At some point, every home that has a security system will have video as a component. Law enforcement will know who comes and goes through nearly every front door.”

“In twenty years, the government will always know where your car is, the same way they can track your phone. Taxis will someday only take credit cards. Busses and trains will require you to swipe an ID, and so on. If you travel, the government will know where you went and how you got there.”

“Imagine, for example, having a smartphone, an iWatch, and a smart car. When you go to the store, the cashier will someday automatically know that you, your car, your watch, and your phone are all in the same place. That is nearly a 100% identity check. When you approach the cash register, I can imagine your phone automatically identifying itself and pulling up your photo on the register.”

Virtual reality environments for the elderly

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Is anyone creating virtual reality games/environments for the elderly? I’m not a gamer but each time I happen on some video a new game, I’m stunned by how good the graphics have gotten. I assume all other aspects are improving as well.

Today I can outside and romp and play with the other kids but someday that might not be the case. And I might be in an assisted living facility or whatever they have in the far, distant future for people who can’t care for themselves.

Could a clever person create a custom virtual environment for me. I have thousands of photos, hundreds of videos and many thousands of blog posts and tweets and such. A person could know a lot about my past and interests and use that data to create something amazing.

Instead of playing grab-ass with Mrs. Henson down in the day room, I could jack in to Steve World. Hell, in 20 years, the hardware and software will know things about my cognitive state and compensate where needed.

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There’s a pond at the bottom of the hill on which we live. On nice days I enjoy sitting at the edge and watching the geese. I’ll bet you that could be created with amazing accuracy. Even “get up and take a walk” around the pond (after I can no long walk anywhere). I’ll hear the geese and the wind in the trees and maybe smell the grass.

This might sound sad and creepy to some, it does to me a little. But aske me again in 20 years.

Scott Adams: Robot Personalities

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“My solution is that all robots must be raised for their first few years in Minnesota, where everyone is kind and generous. I assume there are other spots around the world in which the culture evolved to be unusually friendly. Part of the value of your future robot is where it was imprinted with its base personality. Someday the Minnesota Series of robots will fetch top dollar.”

“They were playing chess while we were playing checkers”

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Robert Draper asks the question in a longish piece (Can the Republicans Be Saved From Obsolescence?) in the NY Times. The pieces that grabbed my attention had to do with technology. A few examples (from many):

“1.25 million more young people supported Obama in 2012 over 2008.”

“Obama was the very first candidate to appear on Reddit. We ask our clients, ‘Do you know what Reddit is?’ And only one of them did. Then we show them this photo of Obama hugging his wife with the caption ‘Four more years’ — an image no conservative likes. And we tell them, ‘Because of the way the Obama campaign used things like Reddit, that photo is the single-most popular image ever seen on Twitter or Facebook.’ ”

“Romney’s senior strategist, Stuart Stevens, may well be remembered by historians, as one House Republican senior staff member put it to me, “as the last guy to run a presidential campaign who never tweeted.”

“They were playing chess while we were playing checkers,” a senior member of the campaign’s digital team somberly told another top Romney aide shortly after the election.