The Shape of Things to Come

7 minute read. I've gotten this moniker from a number of sources over the years and at this point in my life/career I'm willing to embrace it. How did I become a crusher of dreams? I might say it's because I value skepticism and the hard truths of physics. My wife would say it's because I'm not very agreeable . Really, I was set on this path in grad school. I would never recommend getting a PhD to anyone - if you need a recommendation, you're not in love with it enough to endure it. First you need an advisor, who is expected to be 1) brilliant in their field, 2) an excellent lab manager, 3) good enough at writing grants to keep everyone paid, and 4) ideally a decent teacher. I have no idea why universities expect to have all of these criteria met by a single person, much less every professor they tenure. The tragic stories of most grad students show how often 2) and even 3) cannot be taken for granted.  The biggest academic challenge is not the qualifying exam o...

4 minute read. Simplicity can generate vast complexity - the Mandelbrot fractal is a wonderful example. Iterating one tiny equation leads to patterns of infinite depth and detail, nearly repeating, but not quite. Computers and software are based on nothing more than the transistor logic gate and bits memory - Alan Turing realized stringing enough of them together could solve nearly any algorithmic problem. The human genome has 2.5 billion base-pairs of DNA, which is only about 600MB of data. Somehow all the information that generated you or me could fit on one CD-ROM from the '90s, even though we largely can't even fathom how our own bodies function.  Deep neural networks are a relatively simple construct that led directly to the explosion of machine learning (ML) we're witnessing today, from facial recognition to real-time translation to image generation and artificial intelligence. They are a recursive statistical process, inspired by a theory of how the brain might w...

5 minute read. My previous post on Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence might have come across as a bit foreboding, but I actually find myself much less concerned about humanity's future than many software engineers I know. There's a rich background of dystopian science fiction about AI enslaving humanity, but I find it to be a bit far-fetched, even though I have no doubt that ML algorithms will eventually, perhaps soon, far surpass human skill in any measurable contest. The question of our future though, is not one of intelligence, but of power and motivation. We are building AI to solve problems. I speak not of myself personally (I don't work in the field) and not even of my employer (though they are certainly expanding the state of the art along with most other tech companies), but of humanity in general: we are a global society and no one acts in a vacuum. The primary fear I hear is that AI will, through superior intellect, come to either control or destroy us ev...

2 minute read. We used to say humans were the only conscious beings, so it didn't matter how we treated animals. In fact we even labeled many humans (slaves, native peoples, various foreign enemies) as animals, justifying their mistreatment as well. But running even deeper than the desire to have power over other beings is the desire to feel special ourselves - that our very nature puts us above someone or something.  We've been steadily widening our definitions as we have become more civil to more people and creatures. The more we study animals, the more we see ourselves - our brains are really not so different. Yet we feel comfortable with this broadening definition of consciousness because we smugly know that we humans still have more processing power. But now, along comes artificial intelligence.  Suddenly there is more talk of consciousness and specifically how artificial intelligence doesn't have it , but what terrible things it could mean if it were attained. Fundam...

5 minute read. Originally an aerospace engineer, I've been a software engineer now for about half my career, but it doesn't quite feel like engineering to me. I don't want to start an argument on the definitions of terms, but hear me out, I think there are some interesting differences.  I remember first thinking it was odd that at my university, the Computer Science department was not in the College of Engineering, but in the College of Arts & Sciences. Sure, "science" is right there in the name, but the practitioners are generally known as software engineers, and certainly they ran in the same circles as the rest of us engineers. However, while the civil, mechanical, aerospace, electrical, and chemical engineers were required to fill our time with math, physics, and mechanics, the software engineers had to take humanities and social science electives just like the comparative literature majors.  I also remember when my career first turned from aerospace - I j...

5 minute read. I was raised by back-to-the-land hippies, so I grew up with a pretty negative view of capitalism, but also with no clear idea of what the word meant. My parents were distrusting of rich people; a bias I still carry with me even as I'm becoming one. They considered debt to be evil; they never even had a mortgage, having bought five acres in the 1970s for $10,000 which they borrowed from my five-year-old brother's inheritance. They paid him back, though I have no idea if interest was involved. So anathema was debt that I honestly believed I couldn't go to college without a free-ride, since they had no money to send me. I managed to get enough scholarships from writing a dizzying array of application essays, but upon arrival I realized my stress was probably misplaced given everyone else had taken out student loans.  One of my closet friends in college had the opposite upbringing, where his family not only discussed investment at the dinner table, but played Mon...

The cabin I was born in. I grew up in the sticks, on a tiny island in the Puget Sound. My parents moved there in the '70s as back-to-the-land hippies and built the log cabin my mom still lives in (I wrote about my late father here ). I had it easy with power and running water by the time I was born; my siblings had ten years without. But there are some funny things about the country, as illustrated all too well by an article entirely too close to home: The True Story of the Antifa Invasion of Forks, Washington . It's a long read, but I highly recommend it; while I don't know any of the people referenced, I feel like I could have. It's a good portrait of a world far outside the urban bubble.  Now, my town was actually closer to Port Townsend, a tourist metropolis of about 8,000 people that served as my bright, shining lights. Port Townsend probably has more artists per capita than anywhere in the state and has attracted hippies like my parents for decades, so it's qu...

As a software engineer working on graphics I’ve drifted a pretty long way from my original specialty, aerospace controls. I’m glad I got my PhD in controls though, because it taught me a unique way to approach problem solving, one which I tend to apply well beyond the traditional realm of controls. Controls is a very math-heavy discipline, focused on proofs and guarantees of safety because in many situations lives depend on the reliability of the system: autopilots come to mind, but there are countless examples in many fields. At its core is uncertainty and the management thereof. The first thing we’re taught when modeling systems is that our models are inevitably wrong, and not by a little: nothing is linear, nothing is rigid, nothing is independent of the world around it. These assumptions make our math tractable, but they are not realistic. And yet, all is not lost: we take our terrible models and our unreliable sensors and we bound their uncertainty. No matter how poor the input is...