This Perfect Day

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:50 -0500

Happiness or freedom, which would you choose?

Summary

Levin tells a story about a community known as “the family” which is comprised of a group of members who are sedated and regulated by a computer known as “uni”. Uni knows all, plans all, and grants from each according to his ability to each according to his need. One member starts having doubts about the entire enterprise.

Thoughts

It is hard to judge books like this one in the year of our lord 2023, as so much of what we now read and see draw their inspiration from seminal works such as this one. A side effect of this is that when read in the present the story feels redundant, is this Levin’s fault or a consequence of passing time? This book at a surface level has some obvious critiques against Communism and in our times against the encroachment of AI into public decision making. The message of the book did seem at times to be too transparent, too in the readers face, damaging the experience for me. On a deeper level this book asks us what it is we are striving for? This is actually a very interesting question especially in terms of equality. We strive to create a world where everyone is treated the same, but is that possible when people are so diverse? Will we need to sacrifice individuality for equality? To me this is still an open question, and thanks to my recent reading of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents I find it hard not to see the hand of Eros in this movement towards oneness. Another takeaway from this book was that of further critiquing Utopia’s in general. The main character Chip agrees with Dostoyevsky’s underground man, Utopias are inhuman because they are not built for humans, but for machines. They are built for things that always act according to rules that are tabulated in cold sterile databanks. In order for humans to act in this way they must forfeit the thing that makes them human.

The Book of Why

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:38 -0500

Judea Pearl is one of the fathers of modern Bayesian Networks which are pretty much used everywhere these days. So, in my pursuit to find a book talking about AI, I stumbled across this book. This book explains Judea’s latest contribution to computer science which is a mathematical approach to modeling causality. In the book he starts by explaining where the phrase “correlation does not equal causality” comes from. His argument is that with statistics you will never be able to define causation, because statistics does not have the language or framework to make such statements. As such statistics and big data can only go so far in their abilities to provide answers for our questions. Instead of approaching problems with the esoteric methods of regression, data stratification and trying to control for various values based on intuition, he proposes that we should try to approach problems more like human beings. He breaks the idea of causality into three rungs on a ladder. He proceeded to explain a sort of calculus that quantifies the effects that different causal relations have on the outcome of a situation.

Artificial_intelligence on George's Blog

This Perfect Day

The Book of Why