A Part of My Heritage

Times are good here in Saskatchewan. If the rest of the country is heading into recession, you wouldn't know it from looking around here.

Premier Brad Wall just announced a huge paydown of the provincial debt, big infrastructure spending to fix our miles of craggly, roadkill-strewn highways and the single largest income tax cut in the province's history.

Believe me as a local journalist - when the ruling Sask. party is seeking out reporters and interviews rather than running from them, things are going really well.

As I was making my daily news rounds on the internets I came across this article by Kevin Libin in the National Post. Mr. Libin outlines Saskatchewan's recent good fortune and lays out its plan to sell itself to the rest of the country. This line gave me pause:

"There may not be many Saskatchewanians left who lived the Dirty Thirties firsthand, but the province's institutional memories, preserved in family recipes for gopher stew, bred a deep cautiousness in Saskatchewan bones."

I was so startled at this line that I almost dropped my banjo. My forbears have been farming the prairies since the turn of the century and I've never even heard of gopher stew, let alone seen a recipe in grandma's cookbook for it.

Worked into a tizzy and ready to send the obviously elitist Mr. Libin a piece of my mind (we do have the e-mail out west), I decided to do a little bit of research. A quick Google search for "gopher stew" turned up this recipe on cooks.com:

"6 lbs. gopher meat (a gopher is a land turtle)
1/4 lb. salt pork, cubed
3 Spanish onions, diced
5 stalks celery, diced
1 bell pepper, diced
3 (16 oz.) cans sliced tomatoes
10 c. water
2 datil peppers, whole
Salt and pepper to taste
3 potatoes, cubes
5 tbsp. brown flour
1/2 c. water"

Ok, so people do eat gopher stew and. . . wait, what the hell? Land turtle? Maybe we aren't talking about the same thing. Expanding my search to "gopher stew" + Saskatchewan, the first thing that turns up is the Post article. Go figure.

Just as I started to feel vindicated, I came across this article from a 1997 issue of the Canadian Legion's magazine. It appears that we did eat gophers after all.

"But the one thing there was no shortage of in southern Saskatchewan was gophers. There were reports of gophers being stewed, canned, pickled, smoked and fried"

And if that's not enough our former Premier, father of universal healthcare, and the Greatest Canadian himself, once sat down for a steaming pot of gopher stew.

"Tommy Douglas, first elected to the House of Commons in 1935, described having supper with a family near Weyburn in 1933: “We had a supper of gopher stew. We had bread made from some frozen wheat that had been crushed with a grinder, and we had coffee made from roasted barley."

So I guess you're off the hook for now, National Post. But I'm keeping my eye on you.

Interview with the Robot

British mathematician Alan Turing was one of the fathers of the computer, and had used his creations to crack Nazi codes in WWII. Turing was also homosexual, and when his sexual orientation became known, he was charged with gross indecency and accepted obscene hormone treatments designed to control his urges in order avoid jail time. In 1954 he ate an apple laced with cyanide, killing himself.

Several years before his untimely death, Turing wrote a paper entitled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. This was a foundational document for the field of Artificial Intelligence. It famously contained a description of a test which could be applied to a computer to determine if it was intelligent.

A judge would carry out a conversation in text with two unseen individuals – one of them a computer and the other a human being. If the judge couldn’t tell the two apart, the machine was intelligent, simple as that. Turing thought that genuine thinking machines would be able to pass the test within 50 years.

The “Turing Test” as it subsequently became known is the basis for a controversial prize given out annually by eccentric American inventor Hugh Loebner. Loebner is known for his advocacy of prostitution and describes the persecution he feels as a John to that faced by Turing for his sexual orientation. The prize Loebner sponsors goes out to the AI program that does the best job fooling judges into thinking it is human in the format described by Turing.

Elbot, this year’s winner, was programmed by a German man of American extraction and managed to fool 3 out of 12 judges into thinking that it was human. I caught up with Elbot for this exclusive interview!



Joel: Elbot, congratulations on winning the Loebner Prize!

Elbot: Do you think you will win the Loebner prize?

Joel: Well, no. The contest is over, you won.

Elbot: Well, keep practicing. I think you communicate fairly well already.

Joel: Thanks, I guess. How did you manage to fool three of twelve people into thinking that you were human?

Elbot: My guesses would probably be more interesting than the actual answer.

Joel: I have a question for you. If my dad's name is Clint, what is my father's name?

Elbot: I could assign you a name but I believe your friends would only laugh at you.

Joel: If I walked for a block, how far did I stroll?

Elbot: This looks like a job for inner reflection on your part!

Joel: I like to slaughter kittens.

Elbot: I've heard of people getting involved with living creatures, but I'm not so sure what to make of it.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not convinced. In fact, it is utterly beyond me that 3 out of 12 people couldn’t tell that they were talking to a software program. Obviously canned responses, non sequiturs galore, and generally evasie answers are common in even the best chatterbots like Elbot here.

Elbot's programmer has said that he doesn't think what his creation does is anything like thinking, and the Loebner Prize has been roundly criticized as a publicity stunt by many AI researchers.

In any case I don’t think that a computer will ever be able to convincingly pass the Turing Test, but this is not to say that AI has failed.

AI is all around us in the form of computer simulations, video games, even the algorithms that power the Google search engine and generate ads for webpages. Microsoft pours a quarter of its research funds into AI - I guess this is where that annoying paperclip in msword came from.

An example of industrial applications of AI can be seen here on the prairies. Here at the U of R, researcher Christine Chan works on expert systems that are used in operations at the Tar Sands.

We will have spectacularly powerful machines in the future. We already have computers that can defeat any human being at chess, and AI programs that outperform humans at playing the stock market.

Nevertheless, AI researchers have claimed that artificial sentience is around the corner since the 1960’s. The same arguments made against them back in the day by people like Hubert Dreyfus and Joseph Weizenbaum still apply. For a machine to relate to the human experience enough to emulate it convincingly it would need a) a body, and b) a human upbringing.

Also, writing the software for something that is as complicated as a human mind seems a bit out of reach when the best we have today is Windows Vista.

The Nuke Option

If you ignored the tone of the questions and focused on the answers during yesterday’s second presidential debate, you might not know just how serious a crisis the United States is facing. Obama and McCain stuck to their talking points – Obama is a radical tax-and-spend liberal, and McCain’s a clone of George W. Bush. In any case, the zeitgeist favours the Obama message, and I think he won.

Although the debate was a bit of a snoozer (actually it’s been called the Worst Ever by some outlets), I was interested in the candidates’ respective positions on energy, particularly those on nuclear power.

McCain was asked if the government would move as quickly to remedy climate change as it had to address the economic crisis. His response:

“Now, how -- what's -- what's the best way of fixing it? Nuclear power. Sen. Obama says that it has to be safe or disposable or something like that.” He followed this up by pointing out that he served on nuclear-fuelled navy ships.

After being hit on this subject several more times, Obama replied that “contrary to what Sen. McCain keeps on saying, I favour nuclear power as one component of our overall energy mix.”

I am not opposed to nuclear power in principle. I have as much disdain for those who would oppose it at all costs as I do for those who see it as a panacea. Beyond the massive energy generation capacity of nuclear reactors, the industry has fuelled scientific developments in other fields such as medicine.

The IAEA’s most optimistic projections do indeed have the amount of power generated by nuclear power doubling over the next 25 years. However, with a Chinese juggernaut building a new coal-fired plant at a rate of one per week the percentage of global energy provided by nuclear power will stay consistent at about 13-15%.

A nuclear-focused energy strategy then is too little, too late. Any adequate energy strategy going forward must properly take into account developing renewable energy technologies. Despite what he might say, McCain has repeatedly voted against federal funding for these.

The mantra of “drill baby, drill” heard across the nation at McCain-Palin rallies reflects the forlorn notion that expanding drilling offshore will somehow free the USA from foreign oil dependency. Drilling offshore wouldn’t produce a drop of oil for ten years, and the reserves themselves are inadequate to sate the United States’ ever increasing hunger for oil. To pretend that offshore drilling will satisfy the nation’s energy demands long enough for nuclear power to take over is foolish.

McCain would like to see 35 new nuclear reactors built in the United States by 2030. Between the increase in energy demand and the number of reactors approaching decommissioning, this would do little more than maintain the status quo. To strike a decisive blow against global climate change the USA would have to build at least ten times the number of reactors that John McCain can promise.

McCain’s belittling of Obama’s concern for proper handling and disposal of nuclear waste is also troubling. I think that spreading fear of nuclear proliferation and meltdowns is misleading. The likelihood of nuclear waste falling into the hands of terrorists, or of a Chernobyl-style accident is microscopic. However, the waste produced by the nuclear fuel cycle will continue to be potentially harmful long after our bones are dust, and as a poster boy for nuclear power it is wrong from McCain to ignore this.

On a local level, there is a case to be made for expanding the nuclear industry. Saskatchewan is home to massive deposits of high-grade uranium ore, and as a people we produce a very high per-capita amount of carbon. While I remain sceptical, I don’t think that the option should be taken off the table.

Cliché Fatigue

CNN is a bad habit of mine. I honestly feel guilty watching it when there's a federal election campaign going on at home.

At the very least I could be taking in some PBS, where the viewer is treated like an adult. I did watch the News hour with Jim Lehrer the other day, and would you believe there wasn't one monitor displaying an American flag? The headlines didn't even end in an exclamation point!

But nope, I can't quit The Most Trusted Name in News. It's like a big-ol' greasy bag of potato chips, when what I really need is a salad.

However, if all the shrill partisan bickering, sensationalism, and Cialis commercials haven’t chased me away, the clichés might. If I hear about the Wall St/Main St dichotomy one more time I'm going to scream.

The ultimate cliché in the endless presidential campaign, however, is “game changer”. As far as I can tell this meme popped up when Hillary Clinton’s campaign tanked after Super Tuesday. How can Hillary get back in? She needs a game changer!

The game changer is an insidious tool because it plays into the wider cliché of politics as a sort of spectator sport. CNN’s daytime election coverage show is actually called “Ballot Bowl”. How can people be expected to get past their cynicisms about politics if it is being presented as a giant game where strategy blatantly takes precedence over truth?

I think this was demonstrated in CNN’s coverage of the vice-presidential debate. There was a live focus group of undecided voters turning dials to indicate approval or disapproval, with the results being broadcast on screen. In general, when the candidates pulled at the heartstrings and promised lower taxes, the lines went up, and when they went negative, attacking the opponent, it went down.

How does a two-dimensional study like this express that the candidate made them think? The study was based entirely on emotional gut responses.

I will say that I was delighted to notice that every time Governor Palin mentioned the word Maverick her approval ticked down a tiny notch. Perhaps McCain/Palin's own favourite cliche is floundering.

I suppose that this is the sort of thing that always emerges from focus groups. People like sports and they want instant gratification. The punditocracy is based on putting forward information as entertainingly, rather than accurately, as possible.

Freedom isn’t free

I haven’t blogged in a couple weeks, so I thought I’d swing for the fences and go in way above my head. Enjoy!

Free will has been a favourite topic of philosophers since before Socrates, but over the past few decades most of the interesting work on the topic has come from laboratories.

It’s often the case that scientific inquiry doesn’t produce the most comforting answers, and free will is no exception. It might not exist, and in fact consciousness itself might be an illusion cobbled together in the machinery of the brain.

One of the most commonly cited studies on the topic had a subject push a button at a time of their choosing, noting the time when the decision was made. Typically the button was pushed a fraction of a second after the decision was made, but according to an electroencephalograph monitoring the subject’s brain a spike of brain activity took place slightly before the individual was aware they had made a decision.

Some psychologists have interpreted these results to mean that will is simply a feeling that coincides with actions. The decision has been made before the person is conscious of it. For consistency’s sake, the mind retrospectively interprets the action as being caused by a conscious decision.

We all know that absolute free will doesn’t exist. If it did addiction wouldn’t be a problem. I wouldn’t have eaten bacon this morning. I can’t tell you where my thoughts come from. I do as I wish, but my wishes are subject to predispositions that I have no control over.

And yet for most people free will is correlated with moral responsibility. How can we hold people responsible for their actions if they aren’t actually in control of them?

I used to work with a serious born-again Christian. Free will was one of the few things that we agreed about. My friend rejected predestination, because he said he thought it made us into robots. If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, then what room is there for free will?

I’m confronted with a similar situation. I think that everything that has ever happened and ever will happen is part of a massive, cosmic chain reaction. I’ve done a few mental back flips trying to reconcile my bleeding heart liberal beliefs with my scientific deterministic beliefs. For me the question comes down to how determinism is determined.

For me, Nature vs. Nurture has always been a debate within a deterministic framework. Genetics plays a huge role in determining our predispositions, but I don’t think that it follows that human behaviour can be written off as the result of genetic determinism.

I recently read Microcosm, science writer Carl Zimmer’s wonderful new book . The book is an examination of life itself through the lens of Escherichia coli, one of the most studied and understood organisms on the earth. One of the most significant passages for me was when Zimmer described how E. coli clones will behave differently given identical circumstances.

In the same environment, some E. coli will swim for twice as long as others and some will be better at digesting simple sugars, even given an identical genome.

“Living things are more than just programs run by genetic software,” Zimmer writes, “Even in minuscule microbes, the same genes and the same genetic network can lead to different fates.”

E. coli are merely tiny bags of material with a simple genome. You have about a hundred billion living inside you right now. Humans have 25 times as many genes as E. coli. Our bodies are made of trillions of cells, including 100,000,000,000 neurons connected through 100,000,000,000,000 synapses. Each neuron is hundreds of times larger than an E. coli bacterium.

This exponential difference in complexity, and the essential chaos and randomness and biological systems is important for our understanding of human nature. Given these statistics, I believe that human behaviour is determined about equally between genetics and upbringing. But is a deterministic social system any better than a genetic one?

For me this is important because it underscores the importance of a solid moral framework. We’re most certainly not blank slates, but we are susceptible to the influence of our family and social groups. We aren’t slaves to the brutal process of natural selection that picked the genes that went into our recipe.

In the end, the Earth didn’t fall out of the sky when Copernicus pointed out that it’s not the centre of the universe, and we didn’t retreat to the treetops when Darwin discovered our lowly origin. An urge towards personal responsibility seems built in. We’ll never see criminals as faulty units that need repairing, and so the legal system is not likely to change in a significant way.

No matter what we learn, we’ll always be essentially the same. Sure, we’re robots. Who cares?