On the timing of pregnancy

This is an interesting observation about teenage pregnancy, particularly because I was thinking about the timing of pregnancy within the Noble Ape simulation which I've been tinkering with.



In the simulation, and presumably to some extent in real life also, there are two polar opposite strategies which females could follow. One strategy is to mate as early and as often as possible, maximising your genetic velocity. This strategy may be successful in situations where there are no strong selection pressures and pretty much any actions will lead to survival success.

However, in an environment where survival relies critically upon the collective cooperation between group members it may make more sense to follow a second strategy, which is to delay early mating and try to select the best quality male you can find. Associating with high status group members increases your survival chances, and those of your offspring, because the leaders of the pack get the first choice of food and the best standard of living (groomed by lower status individuals, etc). If ascribed status effects apply, and if high status individuals have a significantly higher survival chance, then the benefit accrued over time may outweigh a strategy of going for maximum genetic velocity.

In the latter context I'm not sure that culture is actually acting counter to evolution, as is being claimed in the video, but instead there is a necessity due to environmental pressures for the selfish genes to follow a different strategy in order to successfully propagate across time - simply sprinting as fast as you can doesn't cut it any more.

It could be that the reason for the stigma attached to teenage pregnancy is because it diverts resources away from the normally stable group survival dynamic, where the dynamic has evolved over time to be in some sense close to optimal within the prevailing environmental conditions. The teenage mother may in some sense be sacrificing her ability to contribute to the survivability of the group overall in order to gain an individual genetic advantage.

Vintage computers

This was my first computer, a Sinclair ZX-80, acquired at about the age of nine. According to the user manual it was intended as a means of learning the BASIC programming language.

Of course, I didn't have this fancy screen, but instead had a similarly sized black and white TV with an analogue dial to tune it to the right frequency. Even by the standards of the time the keyboard was dreadful, and typing on a mechanical typewriter was far easier. Also the way that keywords were linked to specific keys made the typing experience counter-intuitive.



I did try connecting a tape recorder in order to save programs and load them back, and had only partial success. The whole process of using cassette tapes was clumsy and error prone. Storing more than one program on a tape required keeping track of the mechanical position counter, which wasn't always very accurate. Tapes would often wear out, such that the program would only partly load and then hang indefinitely, and sometimes tapes would also get mangled during the very frequent fast forwarding and rewinding.

I tried typing in a few example programs from the user manual. Typically they were less than twenty lines long. One program I remember was called "NIBBLE THE CHEESE", and there was of course the obligatory Hello World program:

10 PRINT "Hello"
20 GOTO 10

It's hard to imagine now, but at that time there was a novelty simply in being able to press buttons or enter small programs, and things visibly change on a TV screen as a result of your actions. Prior to that time TV was just something that you passively watched, and couldn't interact with in any sense other than changing channels (of which there were only three).

Still, despite the humble nature of this machine it represented the beginning of the age of the personal computer, and everything which goes along with that. I sold my ZX-80 in approximately 1988 to a school friend who was an electronics fanatic. He wanted to use it to control a set of LED disco lights.

More pictures of vintage computers can be found here.

Dead or alive

My estimation of this story about some guy trying to track down Bin Laden single handedly is that probably people in Pakistan don't want Bin Laden to be found. By the sound of it the fellow is a lone loony of the "guns and god" variety, but at the same time the Americans, British and others in Afghanistan don't exactly seem to have gone to any great lengths to locate the world's most wanted man. Indeed, despite the claims made by politicians over the previous decade, finding Bin Laden and bringing him to justice doesn't seem to be anywhere on the priority list. Instead, lots of off-topic activities seem to have taken place, and the scope creep has been quite egregious.

Even a criminal mastermind hiding in a deep underground bunker has to have connections to the outside world - so long as he needs to eat and live anything resembling a comfortable lifestyle - and with concerted effort it should be possible to uncover this human chain. The US has satellite technology with incredible resolution, so with enough overhead surveillance it should be difficult for anyone to move through remote areas without being automatically logged. Even though I don't expect satellites to be able to identify individuals by sight, simply logging the trails along which people and vehicles move should be enough to provide important clues if there is some secret facility in a remote area being periodically resupplied.

Of course, this is assuming that he's hiding in a bunker as is commonly surmised. Perhaps that's not the case at all, and he's living in a city "safe house" but being protected by a few influential and loyal local individuals. In this scenario overhead surveillance would not be of very much use, and over-reliance upon elaborate technology rather than old-fashioned spies on the ground listening to gossip on the street could be the reason why Bin Laden has so far managed to elude detection.

Will the first AGI be a crook?

According to Ray Kurzweil the Turing Test will be convincingly passed by 2029, but I don't think he quite predicted the way in which that might occur. This article suggests that internet based bots might be used to trick users into giving away information about themselves, or clicking on links to sites containing malware. The proposed method is a situation where the bot is behaving as a kind of parasite, linking two human chat participants together and then modifying the messages in transit in order to insert dubious content. It's not quite a classic Turing Test, but it's still a scenario in which some amount of AI might result in profits for the bad guys.

More in the tradition of AGI is the notion of applying data mining methods to social network information, on order to reconstruct a coherent picture of users lives. Knowing the daily movements of an individual could be useful to crooks planning a robbery, and even a quick cursory search on Twitter demonstrates what possibilities exist, such as:

"I'm going out"

"Going shopping"

"Leaving the house"

"Won't be back until"

If the messages are also geo-located then this surely provides a goldmine of information which could be used for malevolent purposes, and even a weak AGI or narrow AI using primitive natural language processing would probably be successful here.

It's possible to imagine a near future cyber-crime scenario in which an AGI is both mining social networks for data and then hiring and directing human resources to grab the loot, and even instructing them on where the most profitable places to dispose of the ill-gotten gains are. It would be like a kind of mafia operation, but without any human leadership and where the human components of the system were almost entirely deprecated. Perhaps there's a sci-fi novel in there somewhere...or maybe it's a novel that's already been written.

I was only following instructions

This is an amusing case, because it shows how under some circumstances people can behave exactly like a robot. I've used various GPS devices, and there are occasions where they can tell you to do things which are silly or would be dangerous if interpreted literally. With my current device there is explicitly a disclaimer screen when you turn it on, saying that you follow route instructions at your own risk.

In this case the woman was behaving like a robot, and not exercising common sense. "Common sense" includes a wider range of requirements, often based upon pure intuition, childhood experiences or warnings from others. For example, it's not a good idea to try to cross a busy motorway with a lot of high speed traffic, even if your phone is telling you that's the way to get to your destination.



But perhaps we should not poke too much fun at the woman who almost became roadkill. There are many occasions in the modern world where relying upon the advice of experts is the accepted thing to do, because your own local knowledge often is not sufficiently extensive to cover all bases. In this case the phone could be characterised as a sort of expert system, and perhaps the woman had too much faith/trust in Google as an authority figure - similar to the Milgram experiment.