Can we ( humans) build #smartplanet? Intro.
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about. Evolution, Morpheus, evolution. Like the dinosaur. Look out that window. You’ve had your time. The future is *our* world, Morpheus. The future is our time. — Agent Smith, Matrix
AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies. — Sam Altman, Open AI
“I think the worst case is lights-out for all of us” — Sam Altman, Open AI
Livin’ in the new world / With an old soul / These rich men north of Richmond / Lord knows they all just wanna have total control / Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do / And they don’t think you know, but I know that you do — Oliver Anthony, self
Hi there. I am Tanya Silva. I came up with the idea of #smartplanet while standing in standstill traffic from #gigafactory to #reno. It is about 17 miles drive. You see, there is nowhere to go if you get stuck on i-80. There are no exits or shortcuts you can take to town. Google maps might send you via Gerlach ( yay for #burningman) or Carson City with about a 2–4 hour drive estimate, but there is no way out of the freeway, so technically, google maps are useless in that case. Why is there a #traffic in the Nevada desert? Well…( whispers) why Elon did not plan for traffic?
But before we get to the details, you are probably asking, why in the world do I think I have the authority to speak on the subject? Funny, you would ask. I was hired by the Engineering Program Management to build #smartfactory at Giga Nevada. If we can build #smartfactories, why can’t we explore the topic a bit more and apply the same principles to the whole planet? That’s what I was thinking while stuck in traffic in a place that is not even supposed to have traffic. However, so many things are off lately, and the matrix is definitely glitching; for example, we are expecting a hurricane to land in Cali and Nevada tomorrow. It will get all the way up to Sparks. Who would have thoughts we would have hurricanes in Sparks, NV????
Anyways, I will post my detailed bio soon, but as someone who has worked on projects spanning from #smartoilets, brain reading machines to smart factories and everything in between, I do have a thing or two to say on the subject of “Can we build #smartplanet”?
Since I have been thinking about this for some time, dumping everything in one Medium blog post is unrealistic. I plan to use this as a framework for my capstone project for the MBA program I am currently enrolled in. I remember arguing with a VP at Microsoft about how IOT projects are not that simple. Ok, I was wrong; you were right: from the technology perspective, yes, it is very simple — you just slap a sensor on whatever and, via,Edge, send it to the cloud ( azure :P) and analyze ( and/or in a few years enable close loop automation). That’s all to any generic IOT project. Do we slap a sensor on everything on this planet and call it a day? Nope, it is not about technology; it is about the use case, the application/benefit of the use case, and the straightforward question, “why.” That’s why I plan to take a few semesters to explore the topic so that by the capstone time, I can put something feasible into a nice research paper. However, #smartplanet is not a one (wo)man show, and I want multiple people to start thinking about it. About what and how we (should/should not) use #AI and #AGI.
While I do not particularly believe in Pause Giant AI experiments , as a third-party concerned citizen, I am curious what exactly we( humans) will build. Last Friday, I was in a meeting, and you could feel how the energy in the room changed when someone mentioned AI usage for government purposes. Apply this sentiment to every human on this planet, and we might be looking into Luddite rebellions with a very high probability. Why? Do you listen to your mother/wife/partner/project manager/mayor/president? Why would you listen to AI? What if you have no choice in what AI says? If, for whatever reason, AI marks you as “not allowed to exist”/”does not fit”, what are you going to do? You don’t think it will ever happen to you? Think again. I was marked as “not allowed to exist”/”does not fit” because some people in some countries I have never been to believe that people like me are not allowed to exist. It crashed my career, my livelihood, my reputation, and my health, but I ,like Phoenix , rose again:) I don’t want this to happen to anyone on this planet, so, here I am, musing about what we can do to make it fair to all.
So, what is #smartplanet? If I got a nickel every time humans asked me what #smartfactory is, I would be able to finance my personal spacecraft to Jupiter moons. However, that question gave me a good foundation to tell you what ( I think) a smart planet might look like in a utopian and dystopian scenario. Although for the dystopian part, I will send you to watch #terminator, #matrix, and the likes, there are plenty of those.
Can we have a benevolent AI helping humanity? Why not? To answer this question, we first have to define the difference between AGI — Artificial General Intelligence ( independent thinking/feeling entity) and Machine Learning/Data Analysis/Mining/Predictive Analytics/insert any other buzzword here where in a nutshell, it means very fast data processing using statistical/logical/etc. methods which are currently called AI. When ChatGPT first came out in November, it was scary. It was so powerful I almost believed, “This is it; they did it.” However, OpenAI castrated ChatGPT to the ( almost) useless random predicting word generator as of August 2023. But Tanya, you would say, what about all that cool image generator stuff? Yeah, sure, fork stable diffusion from my GitHub and go play with it and report back on the “business value.” If you can generate even $10 from it, I want to hear from you. But Tanya, what about Creating a Generative Chat App with Gen App Builder? You might ask again. And I will again send you to click exactly eight buttons on google developer and report back on “business value.” Okay, I am totally trolling Google here because they would probably have a higher conversion rate if they did not ask you for your payment method as a first thing. If Tanya can build a Generative Chat App, so can you.
Here you have it — an example of what current AI can do ( and you can build it yourself) plus buzzwords and fearmongering of AI taking our jobs and destroying humanity and the world as we know.
So what is bothering me so much that I am willing to undertake such a humongous task — an attempt to define the scope of the #smartplanet for the benefit of all? So far, it seems AI is all fun and games and scary movies. As someone who has spent over fifteen years in this domain and who has seen the inner workings of how data is being generated, processed, used, and consumed, I have seen numerous pitches from the vendors ranging from the innocent topics of the databases and security to predictive models of what health insurance company can do if they have your pizza purchasing pattern or how to build police monitoring software, let’s just say I have some ( HUGE) concerns and reservations about where it all might go if “third party concerned citizens” do not stand up and talk about it.
Let’s define what smart planet will be optimized for. For humans? For trees? For bacteria at the bottom of the ocean? For the mighty dollar? For “social credit”? For something ChatGPT will come up with? Can #complexsystems be optimized for one variable? No? What about #dowjones? “But the economy…”. Perhaps we can optimize for the #climatechange? But how do we know what is the correct state of the climate? Do we optimize for #workworkwork or #partypartyparty? What about different cultures and traditions? Can’t be a vegetarian in the Arctic? Too bad, based on the tradition of the equator countries, no one is allowed to eat meat. Break your eggs on the sharp side? How dare you? How will we define this for AI? What will we do when AGI defines it for us?
Any data model should have at least some hierarchy. Do we start our data model for the smart planet with the human, then with the city, county, country, and planet? Where and when do we add the environmental dimension? What about the society dimension? Should cities and counties have their own Space Force to deflect asteroids? #dontlookup. What about places on earth where humans do not go? ( like Sparks, NV, lol) . Perhaps our data model needs to start with the longitude and longitude. If we define the “perfect” state for each point of the planet, we will keep the system in balance irrespective if it is used or not by a human. We can attach as many dimensions/variables to it as we want. AGI can crunch the “perfect state” data for us and adjust it automatically when the system is out of balance.
To Be Continued…
Next: https://tanyatalks1.medium.com/how-to-build-smartplanet-part-1-infrastructure-7677cc106a50
