Born in Romania in the Botosani district (Romanian: Judet) sometimes between 1960 and 1970. Immigrated to Canada in 2001.
Computers and more precise software for application and database servers as well as automation (micro electronics) is the way I make a living.
Working for IBM Canada Ltd since 2010 to present
Children separation at US border: It seem to me we are thinking that a Golden Cage is one and the same with a home. To me golden or not a cage is a cage and a cage does not need to be make of a material thing either!
Every country has the right to choose who can come and stay, but each country will be judged based on how they do that.
It deeply saddens me that the country I was holding high in my esteems related to human rights find itself and the bottom of the barrel in upholding human rights.
We will all go to hell if we can’t make the distinction between the LETTER of the LAW and the SPIRIT of the LAW!
For example, the difference between peaceful Muslims and ISIS extremists is exactly that. Whereas a peaceful religion follower would use the text to allow others to enjoy life the ones applying BLINDLY the LETTER of the holly books will end up hurting others. In the end it is clear that they will end up in hell as God never intends to hurt people.
Punishments based on law infringements, even more important the ones we impose as “examples” for others in order to install mass fear are equally damning and usually on long term have exactly the opposite effect.
United Sates is becoming a communist regime. I could not (or did not want to) believe it, but the signs are there. I lived trough it, and I can recognize it.
Contrary to common beliefs communism is not about the economy, or the common ownership of goods or businesses, is about confusing fact and fiction, or more concise, the wide spread of disinformation and lies in the core of the society leading the destruction of the diversity.
The universe hates to have its diversity reduced. When the diversity falls under a certain level the group who over simplified will collapse. This is how civilizations die. I hope we’ll wake up in time to avoid a western civilization collapse.
Though I’ve seen this coming I was not able to see all the details on how will it happen.
The good thing is that there is a way to overcome the collapse, I call it “The Self reliant way” and includes using all the knowledge we already acquired to strengthen the base of the society, the individual.
To all out there believing that strengthening the individual is a bad idea and the group (or the society must prevail) I will remember you what the realistic solutions look like (as opposed to delusional ones). To showcase this please check how the cabin crews are instructing you to proceed in an emergency case. You FIRST put your oxygen mask BEFORE trying to help ANYONE else. Obviously once you have the mask on you MUST help other if they need help!
That is the key in balancing the abilities between individuals and groups and not the other way around we see currently be promoted in a delusional way by the social agents posed to extract the last ounce of profit of the society even if that will lead to its total collapse.
We need to wake up and face the factual world or we will go the way of the dinosaurs.
Self Reliant, is the only future way to prosperity. Human-Machine symbiosis allows a new way of living and well being. This is the only way humans can become a permanent species in the universe.
Personal and group delusions are our enemy now and forever!
To anyone building walls around anything, playground, house, country … Learn the lesson Ray learned the hard way 😉 . He ended up begging for help from his father. Will your father be there to get you out of your country walls? Hyperventilating? 😉
The English mountaineer George Mallory was asked “Why did you want to climb Mount Everest?”, he answered “Because it’s there”. Mallory died at 37 doing what he loved, climbing Everest.
I have the feeling that with AI these days we seem to have an equivalent approach “Why do we want machines to be like people?” and the answer seem to be “Because is possible!”. I really hope we will learn from history and avoid getting lost (or die) climbing the mountain of humanizing machines.
To understand the technological feat of this simple call, made by a machine, with a voice really indistinguishable from a human, you would need to open the hood of the machine learning software driving the AI application and take a look. I guarantee that 99.99% (or more) of the people on earth will have absolutely no clue on how the machine does what it did (provided all this was not just a trick).
I mean this is “rocket science” for most of people out there, so Google needs to be congratulated. Until you start to think…. (yeah thinking can be dangerous sometimes).
So, we hear a machine making a phone call to talk to a human in order to make an appointment. Both parties sounds perfectly human, but the caller is not. Let’s now think what would happen if the business also get a Google business assistant?
Now it really get’s interesting, and wired and, well … wired, and here is why. If you know a bit of computer programming you already know that you can achieve the same final outcome (your computer scheduling an appointment into another computer) by a 1000x simpler and more predictable algorithm by using simple structured text over internet connections.
What struck me is that this unavoidable future (as a businesses are more probable to get the AI before you) where machines talk to machines and pretend to be people is ludicrous. It is in fact this is an equivalent of a Rube Goldberg case of software solutions where the only reason to do it is “Because is possible!”.
For those cases, I usually like to talk about a potential measure of unnecessary complexity as the RG factor from famous (and funny) Rube Goldberg machines.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a computer nerd and I love those things, but I’m also aware of times when we seem to loose our bearing. Thanks to the audio bellow now I’ll have to drop my home phone as a machines can now impersonate anyone and call me for insane reasons.
Should I now start to send passwords over encrypted channels first so that if my wife call’s me I should ask her the password first to make sure I’m not talking to a machine?
What’s next?
May 16, 2018 —— adding some (positive) ideas —–
The only way to try keep the RG factor low for language tools in AI is to use it exclusively for personal use. That is, you train your own natural language to your own machine interface. Both recognition of your voice and speech syntheses (your machine talks back to you in natural language) are valuable tools when it comes to AI use cases.
This means you can “grow in” your personal machine (starting from very early age and continue to improve it until you die. This will minimize the error rate for both speech recognition as well as speech synthesis leading to a flawless interface between humans and their personal machines. An there is where “personal assistant” has a lot of meaning and real use.
This approach allows us to get one step closer to mastering the many-to-many class of communication we basically are unable to engage today. This will be done by using natural language to communicate with our personal assistants (human <-> personal machine) and communicate between each other via structured, secure, factual machine to machine channels.
In more lay terms you talk to your machine and get things straight and clarified then your machine talks to other machines out there. The receiving end machine(s) will receive, validate, process the information let’s say to remove redundancy (things you already know) then feed you only what really matters for you and the whole community of intelligent living entities.
The future can be bright. Is all up to us to choose the right path…
By now we have all probably heard the two magic letters ‘AI’. Artificial Intelligence we say, and this steers a lot of awe and fear in different people depending on what level of understanding you happen to be on the subject.
The problem is that, as with many other new things in our society, the full utility impact and danger of this technology are pretty much under or over-estimated. If you were old enough to understand the issue, during the first time microwave ovens first popped on the market, you may remember salespeople pitching the oven as a miracle able to cook pretty much anything. Today (2018) most of us would never try to cook something in a microwave oven but simply reheat food already cooked by conventional means. I feel that the same is true with today’s AI hype when we’ll look back in 10 or 20 years.
What is AA then?
AA is not Alcoholics Anonymous as it may first sound like but in the AI context, it stands for Advanced Automation. I think AA is actually what most of the current so-named AI applications are doing. Limited signal (image, sound, or other sensors) recognition, can e hardly be called ‘intelligence’.
Why AA and not AI?
Fits better the current functionality, as in pattern search and identification in various data streams video, audio, other sensor types, or human input (old good keyboard)
In real AI (or AGI), I mean the one Data from StarTreck or the Human Replicators in StarGate or Terminator, machines are self-aware, living noncarbon-based systems. Our current systems we call AI are far away from having enough complexity to allow consciousness to emerge.
The main problem with Real AI
Around 25 years ago (more or less) I won a praise from a radio station when (for the first and last time), I bothered to call in to comment on their show, which was about all those smart machines of the future. At that time AI was not yet what it is today.
My comment, which impressed the radio host was this:
“Any system modeled to work as the human brain does whose complexity is higher than a certain unknown level will naturally spawn a consciousness, or simply put will be a living intelligent entity like you and me!”
This is a totally different ball game than what we call today AI. Our current level of technology is much closer to regular automation but at a higher level of complexity due to the ability to process complex natural data flows generated by sensors sensing the real world by using various Machine Learning systems and variants.
Why we should not create real AI systems?
The answer is simple. If we will create real AI systems, they will by definition compete with human beings for resources and abilities sooner than later. Since we are already living in a highly competitive environment ourselves, the last thing we should do is to add high-ability competitors for human beings. This can and most likely will end in us humans being wiped out of existence. The only thing yet to be solved is a power source compact enough for the machines to use, but we’ll get there.
If not AI then what?
Advanced Automation (AA) targets enhancing existing human beings. Instead of creating new competitors for human beings as in AI’s case, with AA we simply increase the abilities to live and compete with regular humans and even other living things.
May 9, 2018: Since publishing this article I’ve got some feedback and I’d like to add the following additional info to the article. Trying to clarify some issues pointed out to me without getting into technical details.
A hypothesis I like is that our universe uses a fractal engine whose change in the time dimension is powered by quantum mechanics (injecting random changes in the fractal structure). So, basically, it works based on algorithms (laws of nature). There are two kinds of algorithms out there, fully predictive and partially predictive. Regular (no ML/AI) programming is fully predictive. ML and AI are not. We built digital computers to BE fully predictive because we need stability in dealing with the quantum nature of reality (dealing with small random changes).
We did not yet master the classic coding, (how many defects are in our products so far?) and we are jumping head-on into more advanced cases of automatically generated algorithms used by ML which is the bases of AI. My point is simple, to succeed and avoid getting in trouble (legal?) in the future we have to make sure we know how to test ML and AI in order to minimize their errors. On the other hand, we have to educate the end user to understand the limitations, pitfalls, and dangers of the technology.
I’m afraid that the warning Carl Sagan gave us was not to put advanced tech. in the hands of technically illiterate users is near and it can impact all businesses using ML and AI very soon.
So ML and AI test automation as well as end-user schooling in limitations and pitfalls is a must.
From this perspective, I believe that AA (Advanced Automation) is a closer-to-reality acronym than AI, at least for now. Obviously, it is up to all of you out there to choose what two letters to use to label this new technology…
Today a great mind departed from this reality maybe joining a different universe. Stephen Hawking brought light of knowledge to anyone wanting to know.
Best way to remember him would be by reading his work http://www.hawking.org.uk/
I’m the father of a girl and a boy and my daughter and son are not children anymore. In the Me toomovement I can’t afford to take sides and since I have a public site I can’t stay silent either…
To be very clear about this, I will state my position in this matter from the very beginning. I strongly believe that we all should be able to live in peace and no human being (man or female) should live in fear of being used and bullied by other human beings in any way.
Women and girls should feel safe around male human beings and given the same opportunities as man or boys.
All that said, we have to get to the murky part of hows, “the devil is in the details”….
What freaks me out, is this idea of ‘unconditionally trust the women’. In the context of political fights, can get extremely close to repeating the history of the dark ages of the witch hunts. The times when a lot of innocents were used, tortured and killed by other people to enhance their egos, fears and pocket books.
I have published two articles which are essential to understand the dangers of the wave the Me Too movement may create. a wave which can push good people to do extremely ugly mistakes. It can transform angels in to daemons, one judgment at the time. The articles are Fact, Fiction and the Truth and Fact, Fiction and BS.
The key to avoid those mistakes is to understand how Truth, Fact and Fiction concepts are in a tight interplay and how unchecked errors in perceiving each one’s reality can lead do disasters.
Again, I do not try to diminish in any way the women who suffer and possibly still suffer from abuses of males in power (power of any kind). What I’m trying to warn, is for other people who may think they know the facts or the truths in any of those cases and blindly take sides (of both accuser and accused).
If you are a religious person, please remember that one of the reasons humanity has been cast out of heaven is because of making judgments. Remember also the “who is without sin to cast the first stone“. Also remember that “Who lives by the sword will die by the sword“.
If we do not fight with all our power and soul for a fact based world we will only have chaos….
Please read my articles about Fact, Fiction and Truth and make your own decisions in a more safer way for you and all other people around you.
As you see I’m not talking about Lies here, that is a completely different can of worms and I do not want to mix it in this message, as it would send the wrong signal. What I wish, is to warn, that good people, can pushed by a social wave, to rush to judgments and actions they may later regret…
Is Truth the same thing as Fact? What is the difference between Fiction and Lie?
In the post “Fact Fiction and BS” I’ve looked at the notion of Fact. In this post, I will focus on the notion of Truth and its relation to the Fact.
You can check the classic definitions of truth, fact, and fiction in dictionaries or lately online dictionaries. I’ve included some links at the end of the article.
I will try (below) a definition of my own aiming at the core of the concept.
The “Truth” is the mental projection of a Fact
Also, the Truth is the attempt of the human mind to capture and recall a Fact.
Let me present the definition of Fact and Fiction from the “Fact Fiction and BS” article:
Fact: A fact is any piece of information, created by a sensor of any kind measuring one or more parameters, from a well-defined position in space-time and whose content can undoubtedly be authenticated by a quorum of “witnesses” at any moment in time and space, after the measurement, upon request.
Facts are the bricks of what we call “reality”.
Fiction: Any information which is not fact is fiction!
Based on the above definitions of Fact and Fiction you can see that the Truth resides somewhere between Fact and Fiction. For a short time, a Truth can “match” perfectly a Fact but will never be a Fact, it is simply our mental image of a Fact.
So, the human mind alone can only produce Fiction or Lies and in certain cases (at random or not) match a Fact.
One important corollary of the above sentence is that any attempt to find “facts” by probing human memory is futile. For example, using a machine such as a classic lie detector may at best only probe if an individual lies intentionally. If your intention is to get to a fact by using any device to probe the brain’s memory content then you are simply leading yourself on a wrong path.
The most accurate dictionary definition I found so far is in “The Devil’s Dictionary (1881-1906)” stating “TRUTH, n. An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance.“. I’m not sure why the devil seems to be closer to defining a term than the holy. That says a lot about how our psyche works.
So, how and why the brain is such an unreliable machine to produce factual information? Let’s explore some of the most important causes of error.
Errors in how the information is acquired by the brain via natural sensorial processes
Errors induced by the “malleability of the mind” as our memories change continuously for many reasons
Let’s explore those error-inducing reasons.
1. The information acquisition errors.
We all know that our visual and auditive acuity is different from person to person as well as at different moments of one’s life. Our “reality” is constructed by our brain exclusively out of sensorial information. If the information produced by our natural sensors differs from person to person and even for the same person in time, then how can we think we can produce factual information out of it? Additionally, sensorial errors induced by external conditions further undermine the accuracy of the raw basic information our brains use to construct our reality.
An excellent case study, put in a movie is (obviously) The Matrix scene where Morpheus explains to Neo what Matrix is. Interestingly enough our reality may be an even more complex and convoluted case of The Matrix where each individual tends to live in their own Matrix and our reality is only an overlap of many individual Matrix-like realities.
2. Memory storage inaccuracies.
The fact that the information in a human mind matches a Fact does not necessarily makes it a Fact. To be a Fact the information must be able to be verified by other entities (minds or machines) and we have no way, yet, to precisely extract mind states and test them against other minds or machines. The problem is, even if we can probe and examine a mental state, the mental state will change almost immediately (that is how minds work) hence rendering the mind state non-factual. Yet for the mind, there will be no way to sense that without an external reference. So, the Truth (the representation of a fact) will drift away from the Fact. This is a complex relationship and if we are not aware of it we can end up confusing Truths and Facts with disastrous consequences for us and the society.
My definition of the Truth is based on analyzing how the human mind works. To perceive anything, our mind needs to rely on memory. Simply put there is no way for the human mind to make the distinction between any entities outside of the mind itself without prior information about the external world. To use this prior information the mind needs to store it in the physical support, the neurons in the brain.
An interesting book explaining how our memory works and how reliable is (or not) The Memory Illusion by the researcher Dr. Julia Shaw. The book cites many research projects including her own trying to understand how reliable the human memory is, including how the memory can be manipulated. YES! your memory can be manipulated by what you hear in ways you can barely believe. Many other researchers such as Elizabeth Loftus have studied how human memory works and provided sufficient proof for us to understand our own weaknesses and our inability to gather and use factual information by only using our own natural bodies.
So, we are bad at probing our reality with our natural sensors and we easily mess up what we acquired by mixing it with fictional constructs of our own information induced by other minds and yes we do forget things.
Knowing all this, how anyone can hope to get to and be able to work with Facts? Luckily for us, we invented ways to precisely sense and measure reality and also accurately store and recall information. Our digital computers, if used correctly, have the potential to do exactly that.
My solution to these limitations of the human mind is to pair human beings with digital machines in a fully symbiotic way in order to use the machine as a scaffolding for the mind. This new living entity will be able to accurately acquire and use factual information as well as unleash human creativity in the realm of fiction.
I’m coining a new concept called “Self Reliance” for Self Reliant Individuals as the base unit for a society of the future. Self Reliant is NOT equal or equivalent to Selfish, but exactly the opposite. A society made up of self-reliant living entities has the best shot to endure until the end of time and enjoy life together with all humanity. “Live and let live” kind of society. This society is also built on shared facts and will lead to a microbalance of abilities. However this is not a given, we have to fight for this type of society. Unfortunately, our current society seems to head directly towards auto-destruction instead. Yet there is hope….
Obviously, this is what I believe and I’m presenting here the base on that belief. I’m happy to get any feedback that may lead to a better understanding of this essential issue deeply affecting the lives of all of us. I also believe that most of the atrocities humans committed against other living things including other humans during our short history under the sun are rooted in this confusion between the Truth and Fact.
I have intentionally not analyzed the concept of Lie in this article. A lie is an intentional distortion of truth by a human mind when communicating with other human minds. This is all for now on the subject of lies. If time permits I’ll come back to this subject in a different article.
Added on Oct 28, 2018: If you are still skeptical about how easy is those days to change digital information without the ability to detect the change just take a look at the excellent abilities of the InPixio suite of editors (https://www.inpixio.com). Those tools are exquisite and have a lot of use in creating fictional constructs by mixing and altering real data. The edited info is good and can add value as much time as we can detect that it is fiction. Without detection, it is just beautiful BS… Below is a small example of what inpixio erase can do. The following images are before and after the removal of an object from the image:
and, after removal…
End add Oct 28, 2018
Links to other people’s opinions in this matter
Dr. Julia Shaw on human memory imperfections
Elizabeth Loftus: Powerful case of human memory issues
Anil Seth: Excellent talk about the mind and reality
Blowing your mind, we live in “A Matrix” like reality, Nick Mercer:
The heads in the sand: Next, how and why we run towards our own demise… (gullibility and ignorance) Forget for a while this is a commercial, just turn off the sound and see the brilliant way it points out a human weakness of all of us (more or less but always there).
