October 22, 2023 The Washington Post has an article today about Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency mogul who is now awaiting trial on charges of fraud. It starts with the following paragraph: ‘As Sam Bankman-Fried (popularly known as SBF) gets ready to take the stand in his own trial, some fundamental questions remain unanswered. Did…
Category: Fatal Certainty – Excerpts
Artificial Intelligence
The Truly Strategic May Be the Intrinsically Human (AI vs. Rigorous Imagination)
[excerpt from Fatal Certainty] … Every algorithmic predictive system ultimately must be created out of whole cloth, its equations, variables, operands, etc. representing some reality completely outside of our computer systems, which we would like to predict. And every element of an algorithmic system represents an assumption about how something…
Algorithms
Pandemic: COVID-19
[excerpted from Fatal Certainty] …A number of isolated people within the various bureaucracies (CDC, White House, Sandia Labs), more than a decade before COVID, found one another, and began to use computer modeling to imagine the spread of a pandemic flu, and to investigate what policies might be most effective in…
Fatal Certainty - Excerpts
The First and Last Carriages
[excerpted from Fatal Certainty] In the latter half of the 17th century there was an Irishman named Brian Rua (“Red Brian”) U’Cearbhain. He was born in around 1648 in a (still) fairly remote part of northern County Mayo, in the extreme west-northwest of the country, and grew up during the turbulent years…
Fatal Certainty - Excerpts
A Premonition
[excerpted from Fatal Certainty] Consider the following passage, in light of the SARS Coronavirus 2 (COVID-19) pandemic of late 2019-present: …[A] variant of the supposedly beaten SARS corona virus made its way into the United States… At first the new virus was downplayed by public officials. When voters started dying in western…
Fatal Certainty - Excerpts
How Will the War in Ukraine Turn Out?
No One Knows, So We’d Better Start Imagining July 26, 2023 Some 2500 years ago, a ruler of a great kingdom, Croesus of Lydia, saw a threat to his regime arising on his border. A new leader, Cyrus, had already created an empire that dwarfed Lydia, the Achaemenid Persian empire. Croesus,…