ChatGPT and Universal Income

There is a humane argument for universal income, one I believe in, that if people lose their jobs, we have to support them.

But there is an economic-justice argument too, given the job loss economists say ChatGPT and similar programs will cause. Artificial intelligence applications like ChatGPT take information from the web. They treat the collective, creative energy of anybody who ever posted anything on the web as if it were their own.

Earlier attempts at artificial intelligence were like building a better mousetrap, which is not the way to look at ChatGPT. When a computer beat a chess champion back in the day, it was strictly a function of the code. A programmer coded chess rules into the computer, the computer figured out the next right move, and so on.

ChatGPT is more than code. It is data from the web. When a tired house-husband types into an AI engine, “Things to do in Phoenix,” and gets a detailed response, the hard information came from somewhere. ChatGPT can’t figure out the names of parks, zoos, restaurants, and hotels in Phoeni. ChatGPT can’t make value judgments or form opinions about Phoenix attractions. It gets that information from webpages, travel blogs, chamber of commerce pages, and reviews.

The term AI people use for the information they feed into the computer is training data. That’s the right term, but ChatGPT and similar applications stretch the meaning of training data to the point of euphemism. They are not so much using small subsets of data to teach the computer to make predictions, the usual meaning of training data, as creating a gigantic data base by Hoovering up and storing every webpage they can find.

If there’s an alternative explanation for how AI applications know all the facts, I’d like to hear it. Without access to the web, sequestered in a bunker somewhere, without ever having visited Phoenix, I’d like to see AI programmers write an application that returns to me things to do in Phoenix. See, they can’t. The information comes from webpages that in nearly all other cases users have to cite as sources.

This is the case for universal income. The success of AI, and resulting job loss, will happen because of content produced by all of us.

Most of the web already works like that. Amazon reviews, positive and negative, are valuable. They draw people to the site. Some reviewers, working with vendors, have figured out how to monetize reviews. Amazon doesn’t like that, but they benefit from it. Anybody who ever wrote a review on Amazon produced content that helped the site succeed.

Most of us don’t get paid for our reviews. Every time Amazon asks me to write a new review, I feel like they’re ask me to work for free. That might sound like an overreaction, but ask a plumber to fix your pipes when she’s over for dinner and see what answer you get. I write reviews sometimes. I want to fit in. I want give back. But Amazon cashes in.

It’s not a small thing. If everybody who ever wrote a review for Amazon deleted their content tomorrow, Amazon would panic. I’m not advocating people do that. I’m just pointing out reviews have more value than most people think. If Amazon wanted to repopulate their site with reviews, they’d have to pay armies of copywriters. Those copywriters would have to duplicate the expertise of the lost review writers, who in many cases had specialized knowledge of fields like electronics. The copywriters would also have to put in time with the products. The cost would be gigantic.

And so, the economy has changed. In an interconnected world, where information has value, anybody who is typing on the Internet is working.

This content production is more than ChatGPT and Amazon. It’s comments on Yahoo, Yelp, and a million other sites. It’s social media. Every bit of content posted on the Internet makes money for somebody, though often the beneficiary is not the content producer.

And while it might be true that most people who write reviews on Amazon don’t expect compensation, ChatGPT and similar applications short-circuit visits to webpages that do expect compensation.

We’re moving towards a world where ChatGPT and similar gatekeepers monetize access to information, and the people who produce information receive nothing. The change is happening almost without warning.

The better-mousetrap part of ChatGPT is language. ChatGPT sounds realistic. But without facts cribbed from the web, the language skills of ChatGPT would be meaningless. We’d get mad-libs back for responses.

There are reports of ChatGPT college-essay-style answers with fake sources. The most likely explanation is the fake sources are placeholders for real sources. ChatGPT may be holding back real sources to avoid triggering intellectual property concerns. If they do publish real sources someday, a for-citation model of compensation could be worked out with content authors. But they could still hide some sources.

In a way, ChatGPT is a slick version of the high school student who changes a few words in plagiarized content and pretends it’s his work.

If ChatGPT used the Encyclopedia Britannica alone for training material, the program could manipulate and fuse information so that no one entry could be identified as the principal source for a given response. But all the hard information came from the encyclopedia. That was the only source.

This is what ChatGPT is doing with information on the Internet. The human-sounding voice bewitches us. We think the programmers coded an application that can think for itself. But the information is ours.

Universal income might not be the best solution to AI-caused job loss, but it is a solution. The justification for universal income is more than kindness and humanity, though kindness and humanity ought to be enough. The justification is we all produced the content.

Is current nuclear doctrine MAD?

So, the situation in Ukraine has caused fears of nuclear war, because Putin is losing the war and making veiled threats of using nuclear weapons. Some people argue Putin won’t dare use nuclear weapons. They point to Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD, a central tenet of US and Soviet nuclear policy for many decades. MAD is easy to understand. You blow us up, we blow you up. That goes for both sides. According to proponents of MAD, it’s kept us from getting in a nuclear war for many years.

I’m not so sure MAD works, perfectly at least, which is what we need. But more importantly I wonder, is MAD even doctrine any more?

First, let’s look at how effective MAD is. It’s like two gunfighters staring each other down. Look! They’re not firing! But peace like that doesn’t always hold. No matter how much peace is in the interest of the gunfighters, one might decide to fire. People make suicidal decisions, they make bad decisions, and that goes not only for gunfighters, but also for leaders of nations. The survival of humankind is a long game. In recent years, the leaders of China, North Korea, India, Pakistan, Israel, England, the US, Russia and France have had their finger on the button. None of those people can make a bad decision? Other leaders, indefinitely into the future, will always make good decisions, as the globe heats up, food supplies and water disappear, and conflict increases?

And in all likelihood, MAD doesn’t guide nuclear policy for the superpowers anymore, or at least, MAD doesn’t guide nuclear policy exclusively. Side by side with MAD exist doctrines about how to fight a nuclear war, or how to use nuclear weapons in a limited way to gain some advantage. So-called tactical nuclear weapons prove that.

Because, why have tactical nuclear weapons at all if you don’t plan to fight a war? If you believe that nuclear war can’t be won, you want both sides to have the biggest, baddest nuclear weapons they can get. But both the United States and Russia have slimmed down their arsenals. Both countries have fewer nuclear weapons than they did 30 years ago, and smaller ones. That might sound good, but it undercuts MAD, because it makes first use more palatable. Both sides still have enough nuclear weapons to blow up the world several times over. Tactical nuclear weapons make an unwinnable nuclear war more likely.

I don’t see how tactical nuclear weapons make it off the drawing board unless war planners are thinking of fighting a nuclear war. They don’t believe in MAD, not completely. Some part of national leadership in both the US and Russia agrees with the war planners, because tactical nuclear weapons are now part of the US and Soviet arsenals.

Neither the US or Russia wants nuclear war. But neither country completely believes in MAD. Tactical nuclear weapons betray the thoughts of the war planners. They think nuclear weapons can be used.

What’s Wrong with PETA and People

Well, nothing is wrong with PETA, I guess.

What prompts this post is I just clicked on a PETA tweet to end “speciesism,” and though I don’t entirely agree with PETA, in the comments section I expected to see some good information, decent debate, that kind of thing. Instead, I was ambushed by anti-Peta vitriol in the responses. Well, that isn’t true. I was disappointed in the vitriol, not ambushed by it. I guess I secretly expected it.

The anti-Peta responses were a kind of gleeful celebration of killing for the sake of killing. My steak is bloodier than yours, that kind of thing.

PETA’s point was that humans are animals, no better than other animals. They’re right. Biology has made an irrefutable case that humans are animals, evolved on Earth. We still respect the old beliefs, creation myths and such, because those stories are meaningful to some people, and we’re nice. But the religious stories are objectively wrong. The true believers have deluded themselves. Humans are animals, like pigs, chicken, rattlesnakes, snapping turtles, and kangaroos.

Where I disagree a little with Peta, and where I expected to see debate, is that even though humans are animals, we are not disinterested observers of life on Earth. We are biased. Harvesting meat, in some cases, has a lower impact on the Earth than agriculture.

If I hike into a distant pond and catch some bullheads for supper, I’m hurting the ecosystem less than if I rely on farmed land. That’s because every acre of land we farm is an acre lost to wildlife habitat. Grizzly bears and buffalo don’t roam Iowa anymore because the whole state is farmed. The gardens behind our houses use land too, on a smaller scale.

I like PETA. I may have given them money in the past. I can’t remember. But I also admire the guy or gal who harvests a deer once a year, not for show, but to use every bit of the meat. I’m not going to box myself into an ideology. Life is complex. Questions are complicated.

What I can’t get behind is wanton waste, excess impact, unnecessary killing, and so on. And that’s where I take issue with the commenters who trashed PETA. They were all about killing, bragging about eating meat, posting images of bloody steaks, and so on.

Only a few animals other than humans are bloodthirsty. Killer whales hunt gray whales for their tongues, and discard the rest of the whale. Bluefish, predatory sportfish of the east coast, go on killing sprees in schools of baitfish. They kill more baitfish than they can eat.

Other than that, it’s hard to think of examples of wanton killing. If you’re a lion, why kill all the gazelles at once? You only make things more difficult for yourself in the future. Nature has checks and balances.

And we too, when we are savage, hurt only ourselves.

So, I can’t get behind is Bloody Steak Poster Guy. I mean, really? That’s your identity? Nothing else going for you?

Maybe I need to give money to PETA again.

Do Insurance Companies Think Climate Change is a Hoax?

So, I guess the title says it all.

Do insurance companies think climate change is a hoax?

Insurance companies are where the rubber hits the road with climate change. Severe weather costs them money.

If you’re inside the boardroom of Flo-Gecko Insurance in Hartford, Connecticut, putting the final touches on your five, ten, or twenty-five year plan, do you think, “Yeah, climate change is a crock. There is no evidence weather is getting worse. Twitter says we can safely ignore climate change in our long-range business plan.”

Or worse, do you say stuff like that in your big presentation, you know, the one that might make you vice president? “So, as I was saying, Boss, climate change is a crock. That gives us a huge opportunity in Florida. Our competition is running scared. We can undercut their rates in Tampa, Fort Meyers, Miami, the whole state.”

I guess I can’t know for sure. I’m not privy to the conversations at Flo-Gecko. But if I had to put my money somewhere, I’d say insurance companies treat climate change as real. They aren’t debating it at this point. They’re deciding what to do about it.

For some, the question of human influence matters. Is climate change natural, or do we have something to do with it?

Imagine a world where all climate agreements, weak as they are now, fall apart. It’s open season on the atmosphere, China gets to burn all the coal it wants, the US gets to burn all the coal it wants, Brazil gets to burn the rainforest to the ground, and so on.

Does our executive at Flo-Gecko say, “The coal-burning doesn’t change our posture towards risk, in any time frame. Weather events will not be more severe in the future than they would be naturally.”

I don’t know. I just have a hard time seeing that. I bet they think it’s real.

Storm Surge may not be the best term

So, Hurricane Ian missed Tampa, and selfishly, I’m happy with that. I have ties to Tampa, and keep an eye on things. The worst case scenario for Tampa would be the right-side of a major hurricane’s eye-wall aligns with the mouth of bay, and it looked from early forecasts like Hurricane Ian was going to take that path. Instead, the storm went south and Tampa got the left side of the eye-wall, which pushed water out to sea.

However, Fort Myers got nailed, and a lot of houses went underwater. I wonder if storm surge was the best term to warn of what happened.

See, to me at least, storm surge makes it sound like the land will still be under my feet. You know, the storm is coming on, and she’s coming on strong, but I’m still standing in the great state of Florida.

Except, the ocean is surging, not the storm. If the surge comes in, my house is in the ocean. What was once my front yard is ocean bottom until the water goes down, and in a hurricane, it’s a very angry ocean.

This Tweet is a great example of what I’m talking about.

All flooding is like that, I guess. If the river rises, your house is in the river, at least for a while. You’ve lost control. And this is why people die crossing floaded roadways. Psychologically, they think there’s a road there. But they’re driving into a river. The road is river bottom, at least for a while.

So, is storm surge the best term we can use? Because the message needs to be, “You will be in the ocean. You will no longer be in Fort Meyers Beach, or Sarasota, or wherever it is you think you live. You will be in the Gulf of Mexico, surrounded by water, as if somebody picked up your house and dropped it in the water, without asking your permission.”

Land means safety to people. Some people are hesitant even to put a single foot in the water. It might be the sunniest, calmest day ever, and the Gulf of Mexico is usually calm, and they’re like, “Is it safe?” And they wade out up to their hips, and they’re like, “Whoa! I did it. But this is as far as I’m going. Not a step further.” Those same people will stay in their houses during storm surge. They think they’ll still be on land, and their houses will protect them. It’s nuts. We need to do a better job of messaging what storm surge means. “You will be in the ocean, folks.”

A house might withstand the ocean for a few hours, but it might not.

Well, Florida was once entirely underwater, and it will be again, at some point. I mean, the highest point in the state is what, 400 feet above sea level? Florida is just a big sandbar. So, there’s this tug-of-war with the ocean there, and during a hurricane, the ocean wins. Just get out.

Sea-level rise is a good number, and meaningful to some, but it will help other people to understand the ocean will move inland. They can look at a map and see, “Holy cow. Our house will be a quarter mile out to sea when the storm hits.” Phrases like “in the ocean” and “far from land” need to be emphasized. Some people will stay anyway. There’s nothing anybody can do about the daredevils. But sensible people will get out.

So, what works? “During the storm, the Gulf of Mexico will move inland an average of half a mile. Those who remain in the affected areas will be temporarily out at sea, with nobody to help them.” It’s kind of wordy. I’m not sure I like it. But at least it makes it clear what’s going to happen.

Tips for reaching people

My canvassing resume

Thirty years ago, I raised money for environmental groups, primarily door to door. I survived almost ten years. It was a tough life. I earned commission. No donations, no paycheck. For a year, I made less than minimum wage. I got better after that. I read books. I asked questions.

Canvassing was an intense laboratory on communications skills and effective arguments. I got instant feedback, many times a night. A door slammed in my face was feedback. So was, “Will this take long?” I also heard, “You’ve convinced me. Let me get my checkbook.”

I estimate I talked to 100,000 people in my career. If that estimate is high, it isn’t off by much. The estimate may be low!

Canvassing was a lesson on who lives in America. There’s nothing like knocking on every door in a city to find out who we are. I would support a bill requiring every young American to canvass on important issues for two years. It would solve some of the tribal issues that plague us.

The Internet has replaced canvassing as the way most groups reach supporters and potential supporters, but the principles I learned in canvassing are relevant today. It’s important, in any medium, to know how to present an issue to get a positive response.

These tips will help change-minded people reach others. They come from personal experience. I lived the life for a number of years. My advice won’t work for everybody. Some will use other approaches, with better results.

This is my take.

Talk to the right people

Find people in the middle.

Don’t waste time with opponents. You can’t change their minds.

Don’t waste time with supporters. You don’t want to change their minds.

Look for people in the middle, open-minded people, folks who have a position that isn’t entirely set in cement.

Keep things simple

Tie in to people’s background knowledge. Don’t give them background knowledge on the spot.

“We need to reverse climate change.”

That’s good enough to explain what you’re trying to do. People know what climate change is.

From there, assuming you made a wise choice to talk to an open-minded person, and not a supporter or a detractor, field objections in a simple way.

“Yes, it will cost money, but reversing climate change is the most important thing we can spend our money on.”

Stay away from numbers

This is such an easy mistake not to make. Numbers are easy to attack. The more specific the numbers are, the more vulnerable to attack.

“ChatGPT will cause 20% job loss in our state within 5 years.”

Why go there? You’re almost certainly wrong. The actual numbers will be different. The world will never let you forget.

“ChatGPT will cause job loss, just as self-checkout took cashier’s jobs.”

You’re almost certainly right. It’s a stronger position to take.

Some people you talk to will want to quantify things more than others. Numbers will slip into the conversation. Just keep them to a minimum.

Ask for what you want

Ask for what you want, money, a signature on a petition, or whatever.

It may feel good to bring somebody around, but don’t bask in their conversion as validation of your life.

You spent time with them for a reason, and they’re wondering what it is.

“Sign the virtual petition, and donate to the good guys. I’ll send you the link. When can we expect your donation?”

Bow out if you’ve made a mistake

Some people pretend to be open-minded, then ambush you.

Leave.

If you’re on a mission to change minds, and won’t waste time with supporters, why waste time with argumentative opponents?

Just smile, thank them for their time, and go.

Don’t give up

Years ago, I canvassed on the issue of cancer caused by a large industrial facility in Colorado. The neighborhood I canvassed was downwind of the facility. I knocked on the door of a house. The woman who answered kept the door half-closed. She said she wasn’t interested in the issue, but I sensed an opening, and kept at it. As I talked, she opened the door bit by bit. A few minutes later, she invited me in, gave me a glass of water, wrote a check to the group I represented, and opened up about two cases of cancer in her family. She had tears in her eyes.

That kind of interaction is harder to pull off today. We live in virtual silos and bunkers, surrounded by our own kind. We don’t see people. We can’t read their body language to get hidden information about how they think. We express angry opinions on Twitter. When somebody expresses a virtual objection, it sounds final and rude. It may not be. There are people in the middle. We need to approach them with simple, effective arguments. We’ll meet with disappointment, but we’ll convince a few.

In praise of Asian carp

Asian Carp in the Mississippi River

Asian carp are in the Mississippi river, on their way to the great lakes.

They don’t worry me.

The story goes that state agencies and fish farmers, looking for a biological solution to weed control, imported silver, bighead, and black carp, collectively known as Asian carp, to the United States. They escaped to the Mississippi River and bred. They crowd native fish out of preferred habitat, compete with young game fish for food, and most annoying of all, jump out of the water, which poses a hazard to boats traveling a high speed. The big worry is they’ll get into the great lakes. Fisheries managers have identified and blocked a potential point of entry in Illinois.

That’s not good, or so they tell me.

But some of the worries are exaggerated.

Asian carp pose no existential threat to native fish, with the possible exception of paddlefish. Bass aren’t going to disappear, for example.

Non-native species are not bad by definition. We stock and manage populations of non-native fish in many places.

Asian carp have good qualities. They’re tasty,  make good fertilizer, and  provide a recreational opportunity for people.

We’ll habituate to Asian carp with time, as we’ve done with other introduced species. Asian carp will become naturalized.

Asian carp won’t cause other fish to go extinct

It’s hard to make fish go extinct.

The Devils Hole pupfish, a fish that lives in only one body of water, could disappear if the water dried up, or the wrong predator got in there.

But fish with a wider range, like bass, are much less vulnerable. Fish are resilient to population disturbance. Fish lay a lot of eggs.

When times are good for bass, predators key in on the numerous bass fry. When times are bad, predators move away from bass fry, for the same reason bears don’t beat the bushes after berries in bad years. A high percentage of bass fry survive to adulthood in lean years.

Asian carp might reduce the numbers of native fish, but as native fish and Asian carp adapt to each other, the numbers will come into balance, as they did with native fish and common carp.

Fish are not threatened in the same way tigers are, for example. Tigers breed more slowly than fish, and disappear more easily.

An outlier fish that might be threatened is the unique and interesting paddlefish, a filter-feeding, direct competitor of Asian carp. The Mississippi River, however, is an over-productive system. Fertilizer runoff from the midwest grows plankton, just as it grows corn on land. Plankton cycles through the water column, feeds bacteria, and leads to oxygen loss in the water. Removing plankton from the river, which Asian carp do, is not necessarily bad. Paddlefish will still have food. Paddlefish are common enough that snagging them is legal in some states.

Black carp, which feed on molluscs, threaten endangered snails and mussels. However, black carp are the least successful of the three Asian carp species in America. That may change, but it’s true now.

Food, fertilizer, and for sport.

Asian carp are one of the the safest fish to eat from the Mississippi River. They eat plankton. You can’t get lower on the food chain than that. Fish low on the food chain have the fewer toxins than fish higher up.

Asian carp make good fertilizer. Some fertilizer plants already process Asian carp on an industrial scale. It should happen more. Removing Asian carp from the Mississippi River removes nitrogen and phosphorus, which helps solve a longstanding environmental problem. Excess nitrogen and phosphorus from the Mississippi create dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

Asian carp provide sport now, and will provide more sport in the future, as people learn to fish for them. People take them a fair amount with a bow and arrow already. Some people snag them, which is jerking a hook into their flanks. They can also be taken with exotic hook-and-line techniques not yet common in the United States. Asian carp have the potential to entertain outdoors-oriented people in a variety of ways.

We’ll get used to Asian carp

We habituate to all things.

Common carp, also from Asia, were introduced in the United States in the late 1800s. They colonized the Mississippi River from top to bottom. A commercial fishery exists for them. Fifty years ago, when I developed an interest in fishing, hand-wringing over common carp was common. Magazine articles described common carp in terms usually reserved for human villains. Common carp ruthlessly shoved innocent bass away from their nests to eat eggs, thoughtlessly muddied the water, and so on.

I don’t hear narratives like that anymore. In the past 50 years, carp-fishing fever has crossed the pond from England.  Americans like carp now. It’s a thing. People hire carp-fishing guides. Cool kids fly fish for them.

I used to live in Phoenix, Arizona. The cement-lined city canals held common carp and grass carp. In a traditional, native-fish centered view of the world, I lived surrounded by trash fish in an artificial environment. It looked like paradise to me. I caught twenty-pound carp with bread balls and a Zebco 202 just down the block. It’s all in how you look at things.

Even if we don’t learn to love Asian carp, with enough time we won’t hate them. They’ll just be there. But I think we’ll like them.

Non-native fish are OK

Great lakes fisheries professionals manage non-native Pacific salmon.

In other words, Asian carp may be bad, but give me a better reason than non-native status. We value other non-native species.

The whole concept of native and non-native species is dubious. Animals have always moved around, and always will.

We’re hypocritical about species movements, depending on when they happened. If species moved in the distant past, if iguanas made it to the Galapagos islands, if people made it out of Africa, we see a miracle to be celebrated, wondrous life adapting to ever-changing circumstances, and so on. But let Asian carp get in the Mississippi River, and we’re appalled. “It’s a curse, a calamity, and a catastrophe.”

Well, Asian carp are here now. We might as well get used to them.

The idea that things are fixed in place is false. Our short lives are the only reason we see things as relatively stable.

Yes, people helped Asian carp, but fish eggs travel on bird feet too. Animals have always helped spread other animals around.

There’s little chance Asian carp damage the great lakes as much as introduced lampreys did. We’ve controlled lampreys, hard as that was. If we were a little less squeamish, we might eat them into submission.

Asian carp might pose a big threat to the great lakes, but not an unprecedented threat. We’ve been here before. We’ll adapt.

Fish of the future

As time passes, water quality will degrade further in North America. This is inevitable, unless human population stops growing.

Fish assemblages will include more rough fish like Asian carp.

There will be little victories for game fish here and there, rivers restored to a pristine state, that kind of thing.

But rough fish will have their day.

We should be thankful for Asian carp, not upset.

They thrive in a degraded Mississippi river, and in what numbers!

Most of the great assemblages of wildlife in North American, the passenger pigeons, the buffalo, are gone.

The fantastic numbers of Asian carp are heartening as much as they are discouraging. They’re a fantastic show.

Now, despite the arguments I make here, I wouldn’t have introduced Asian carp to the United States. I’m an old school, brook-trout kind of guy.

But I’m learning. I’m adapting.

Let’s live with Asian carp, instead of pretending they’ll go away.