Computing and the Future HW 3: The Act of Measurement

Preamble: The Act of Measurement

I have already learned a couple of important lessons about, Computing and the Future from this course. One about the subject matter and one about myself

I have learned that it is a poor practice to attempt to "predict the future". It is a much better, and possibly "best practice" to identify "future possibilities". Then with study, diligence and simulation one can begin to estimate the likelihood, the probability, that a given future will emerge. As more information accumulates, as the target date approaches, these probability estimates can be refined, updated and improved. But we can never, in accordance with the uncertainty principle, with the rules of thermodynamics, entropy, and quantum mechanics be certain until they have happened, and more precisely, until they have been documented and measured. It is one of our most divinely-inspired and creative acts - the act of measurement that collapses the wave-function of entangled possibilities into the actual reality that we record as history.

There are two parts to this creative act, the act of making the measurement, and the act of recording that measurement. I won't split hairs further on this, but there are important distinctions and limitations that must be articulated for the making and the recording... in the future. It is the act of recording that lets us, albeit in a very limited way, time-travel backwards to the moment of making the measurement itself.

One might think that the least creative thing that a person can do is to make a measurement. It is after all, what would seem to separate the white-coated laboratorians and micrometer-toting engineers from the paint-flinging artists and improvisational jazz musicians. But after some deliberation I beg to differ. The act of measurement creates information that did not exist before the measurement was made. It is, in effect the moment of creation. Each artist who flings paint or notes on a jazz guitar, presembly prepares the paint, its color, texture and viscosity and launches it into the air with some premeditated intention. This includes, for those caught in an existential crisis, the intention of not having an intention, but nonetheless having chosen to fling or not to fling the paint.

"To fling or not to fling,

that is my existential crisis."

Only when the paint lands, only when the musical note hits the ear of the hearer, is the measurement able to be made. When such an act is repeated, it can be compared with the previous one, only because it has been recorded and measured. It can be called better or worse, more or less like the other ones.

I would be remiss if I did not note the similarity of the intention of not having an intention as being similar to the Whitehead-Russell "set of all sets" conundrum solved by the "who shaves the barber" paradox, which incidentally introduced types into computer languages but I digress.

So in summary, we don't predict the future, we identify possibilities and assign probabilities to them. There is no guarantee that we have identified all the possibilities, and there is no guarantee that our probabilities are correct. There is only the likelihood that we have identified some of the possibilities and the likelihood that our later estimates, made with better and more recent information, are better than our earlier estimates made with worse and less recent information.

Now you may think this rant about measurement, worthy of an asylum toga party, has nothing to do with identifying futures that cannot yet be measured, but the second lesson, the one this course taught me about myself may contradict that.

Below you will notice that I have done this homework exactly twice. I can only mourn the tired eyes of the beleaguered professor that must summon the patience and force of will to get through an unsolicited second repetition of an assignment they have already seen one too many times. I promise to make it a brief but significant exercise.

It is the word significant that brings me to the lesson I have learned about myself in identifying future possibilities and assigning probabilities to them; Itself an act of making and recording a measurement yet to exist, one whose wave function has not yet collapsed.

I have, on two occasions in this course, assigned more significant figures to an estimate than was warranted for the amount of information available. The first instance was an in-class exercise where this author, with assistance, devised the question:

"What is the month and year that 'Uber-like' flying taxis will operate in Silicon Valley?"

The first instance of my mistake was in asking, early in the discovery process, what the month would be, when year was correct grain-size of time to be considering. This would seem a minor edit, but, on reflection, I now consider to be a serious conceptual error:

By begging for more precision than the available information provided, I introduced 'possibility-noise' into the discovery process. Possibility noise is asking for excessively fine-grained information that sends eager minds down all sorts of dark and unproductive alleys for no material good whatsoever too early in the process. Eager minds, including my own, chock full of the ability to confabulate useless detail while secreting loads of dopamine are particularly vulnerable to this error. I did not realize how grevious this error was, till similar questions were articulated by classmates that did not attempt to divine the month, but rather settled for the year from the outset, and generated one forthwith.

I fear, that even though I have written down this grievous mistake, I may inadvertently, through some yet to be analyzed force-of-habit, make it again. In that case I have the comforting existence of this blog...

The second instance of my mistake is recorded below and fortunately it is brief. It could have been briefer and it will be, for I am going to repeat the process more briefly. I apologize for saying variants of brief too many times...

In identifying and tabulating six potential areas of impact, for four candidate projects I decided to give each area a score of 1 through 5, to predict its potential impact. Then I added the score for all six areas to rank each of the four projects. Here's the mistake. A range of 1 through 5 is far more resolution than I can assert with the information I currently have. I would be fortunate to correctly answer with a 'yes' or 'no' - a binary distillation. Exactly how fortunate I do not know, because I have not yet experienced that particular future.

So in the first pass, I created the tables for three scopes of concern, that is, the predicted impact to:

• the individual
• the organization
• the society

Each table consists of six impacts that each of four projects might have. This means that there are 24 questions to answer for each scope, for a total of 72 questions. I agonized in the 'possibility-noise-dark-alleys' for some time before I answered each question precisely with information that I did not have. On completion of my task I became a card-carrying agent of the 'bullshit perpetuation society'. Although I can and frequently do perpetuate bullshit effortlessly, I have come to make a conscious effort not to since it is annoying at a very basic level.

To remedy my brief but authentic membership in this society I have repeated the assignment, this time by answering 'yes' or 'no' to each of the 25 questions posed. It might be that lowering the resolution even further might be appropriate, but I have not yet figured out a good way to do that. More seriously abbreviating the assignment further could take me below the 750 words mandated, but I have probably already met that requirement.

One way to lower the resolution appropriately would be to descope the question.

Answering the question for the:

• individual scope requires enumerating one to one relationships.
• organizational scope requires enumerating one to many relationships.
• societal scope requires enumerating many to many relationships.

So an appropriate descope might be just to answer the question for the societal scope, since many to many relationships subsume the two simpler cases.

Assignment: Take One

Q1-I. - For one or more of your proposed topics, make a list of several future potential impacts (such as privacy, security, quality, or any others that seem useful to list), that relate to individuals, such as people like yourself. Explain why these impacts might occur. 250 words.

Proposed Topics


I had three candidate proposals and I added one today, broached to to Dr. Berleant before class. It is a conceptual sketch for a Room Temperature Quantum Computer (RTQC). Thus the four proposals are:

CNN: feature extension of the TensorFlow Neural Network Playground
RNN: demonstration for predicting signals over time using machine learning.
CBL: Soft Gates & Continuous Boolean Logic as a future computing architecture
RTQC: Room Temperature Quantum Computer

In addition to requested impacts for privacy, security and quality (of life?), I am adding:

• educational impact: the power to enhance technical understanding.
• economic impacts: value creation
• usefulness impacts:  amplification of human, or technical leverage.

I will use a five point scale and then briefly discuss for each item the rationale for the choice. If an attribute has a 5 it is assumed that the 5 is imbued to the positive considerations. So a 1 has more negative considerations and a 5 has more positive considerations.

The first column of the table below enumerates the kind of impact, and the second through fourth columns specify a pertinent metric or use case at the individual, organizational, or societal level. The top row shows which of the four projects is in play.

Definitions and Qualifications: 

1) Educational impact as would pertain now to the student or expert user at the individual, level or in the future for the organizational or societal level.

2) Economic impact as profitability that would exist now for the individual developer or in the future for organizations or society.

3) Useful impact as in the extent to which a person at the individual, organizational or societal level would find the fully realized product useful.

4) Impact of Privacy Enhancement implying the degree to which individual privacy is protected considering the legitimate needs of the organization or society.

5) Impact of Security Enhancement implying the degree to which individual privacy is protected considering the legitimate needs of the organization or society.

6) Quality of Life Impact as in the extent to which a person at the individual, organizational or societal level would find their quality of life improved with the fully realized product.

Inputs are coded as yellow cells. Arbitrarily specified or estimated values are listed in blue and computed or carried over values are listed in gray cells. With these definitions in play we can now specify, estimate, or guess a quantity between 1 and 5 that represents the specific impact. First for the individual we have:

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Q1-II. - For one or more of your proposed topics, make a list of several future potential impacts (such as privacy, security, quality, or any others that seem useful to list), that relate to organizations, such as businesses, governments, etc. Explain why these impacts might occur. 250 words.

For organizations I have scaled the impacts by the number and kind of users and non-users of the product, and expert and non-expert users as well. This is parameterized so that different ratios in different organizations can be assessed. While in the individual case we assume the expert user, in this organizational case we assume a richer set than we will see in the society at large:

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Q1-III. - For your proposed topics, make a list of several future potential impacts (such as privacy, security, quality, or any others that seem useful to list), that relate to society as a whole. Explain why these impacts might occur. 250 words.

According to the link at the bottom of the figure, I optimistic estimate there are on the order of two experts per 100 of the population in technical countries. Even though 98% of the people will not be educated by the four technologies they could nonetheless enjoy varying degrees of impact in their lives for the remaining categories.

In terms of selecting which project to execute for this course, I am leaning towards the first - extending the TensorFlow Playground to utilize additional Feature Recognition Functions. It is the highest ranked of the proposed projects at all the scales of aggregation, individual, organizational, and societal. I am confident that I can implement the extensions proposed and it will make an excellent class demonstration.

Assignment Take Two

I now repeat the process with Boolean values. Will the given project have a given impact.

First the individual scope:

Second the organizational scope:

Thirdly the societal scope:

Discussion of Assignment Take Two

By answering each impact question with a yes or no answer I have reduced the amount of 'possibility-noise' in the analysis to what I feel is an honest amount. An honest amount being that, if I were in a court of law, I could reasonably assert as probably.

Notice that by summing each of the impact numbers the total impact of the first three projects is identical! This could mean that I do not know, a priori, what their true impact would be. Alternately it could mean their impact could be approximately the same.

As I mentioned in the Assignment Take One, the RTQC project is one that would require institution-level of support, beyond the scope of the class or one person's abilities or funding level. This leaves me to choose between the first three projects, precisely the position I was in before I began the assignment!

As I also mentioned before I am leaning towards the first CNN because of its educational value for the class, but if I complete it, I may attempt the others, so that the impact can be compared. 

Comparing the impacts would require setting up metrics for measurement beforehand so that the order in which the projects are presented does not confuse the results.

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Q2.  Read 20 pages in the book you have obtained. Explain what you agree with, disagree with, learned from it, and how your views agree with or disagree with the reviewers of the book that you are reading.

I have moved this answer which was quite detailed to my ongoing review of the book, "The Human Race to the Future" a single curated document that is here. In the session for this question I reviewed chapters three through six of the book. For brevity I have removed the content that was previously here.