A recurring idea from Jaron Lanier (“You Are Not A Gadget” – 2010) goes like this: “It isn’t really a question of whether AI can get smarter than humans. It is more whether humans will collectively (unconsciously) agree to make themselves stupid enough to descend to the same level as artificial intelligence”. I’ve paraphrased but you get the idea. What does this have to do with the social debate over transgender athletes?

Somewhere about the time when the #me_too movement was percolating (which I was basically totally cool with), I also became aware of a growing social arena fracas around the controveries associated with transgender athletes wanting to compete in their beloved sports disciplnes. With their newly gendered cohort. Practicality was such that the lion’s share of these cases involved previous males competing against always females.

Sure I was aware of the pretty dumb Bobby Riggs boast, and subsequent miserable failure, that he could kick Billy Jean King’s tennis ass in 1973, simply because he was a male and she was not. Riggs reasoned that the age difference, his 56 to her 29, would be a non-factor in comparison to the chromosomes. The televised result was 29 Winner and 56 Loser. But that was a different matter. It was basically an age differential demonstration: a top-of-her-game lady tennis player could defeat a plus-20-years-retired male loudmouth. Nobody was crossing the sex gender line. Besides, many believe that Riggs knew full well that he would get pummeled but basically went ahead motivated by a cash grab from the hyped-up event.

Maybe it was grace, since I’d paid zero attention to the minutae of the gender evangelist arguments at the time, 2017-ish, but it seemed to me a fairly non-controversial aesthetic and reasoning judgement — I do prefer employing both! — in order to make the call about transgender athletic competitions:

Boy wants to be girl. Boy gets rid of dick. Ex-Boy misses the thrill and physical joy of high-level sports which he always was good at. Ex-He might also miss the acclaim. Ex-Boy agitates that he should be permitted to complete in women’s tournaments of sport X cause he is now a Girl. — He is not a Girl in my view; he is an ex-Boy partly. But more on this later — Activists get involved cause that is what they do. Most activists do not give a shit about spectating sports. Activists, motivated by propping up the right of any human to declare their own sexuality push for the ex-Boy’s desires. Meanwhile, the sports viewing audience for sport X (and Y and Z) can see something bogus when it smashes them in the eyes. They point out that spectating such transgender matches sucks because the usual defining characteristic of high-level sports competitions is missing or drastically curtailed. Namely drama and the compelling battle of evenly-matched wills. In parallel, the Girls competing at a high level in sport X get increasingly pissed because they seem to suddenly have greatly diminished chances of vying for a championship, their life’s dream, because the match is no longer close to even. Chaos ensues as social media and sociology activists and sports opinionators go ballistic, each having different agendas over what the important core fact is.

What I think is that dicks and vaginas have stunningly little impact upon the performance capacity of athletes in various sports. But muscle size and strength do. Limb speed and length do. So does overall physical capacity for oxygen intake and use during bursts of activity. These factors all are not operated upon during transgender procedures. It’s the dicks and the hormones. As anybody with opened eyes can tell, the transformation results are not 100% convincing. Call me old school but no matter how many times a website or gossip rag touts the beauty of post-op Bruce Jenner I am basically seeing the awkward opposite. But that’s subjective and we can let it pass. Ex-Boys should not be allowed to compete with Girls because the athletically relevant aspects of their physiology are still ‘Boy’ which is patently unfair and uninteresting to watch in a competition. I am not saying I have a great solution to this matter; I am just saying that the logic and aesthetics underneath the issue are pretty clear to me. I would point out, also, that it is interesting to me that Ex-Boys do not normally agitate to complete in all-Boy athletic events. Also not an ideal solution, but much better than the reverse.

Detecting The Bogus

Coming at last to the real topic of this post, sensationalized memes like transgender athletics, the actual competencies of AI, and the politics of public awards highlight an increasing need for individuals to develop sharper, less emotionally-compromised discernment about events and the way they are presented. For example, to me it should go without saying that I have no lack of empathy for the plight of persons who agonize about their gender during various stages of life, and bear no ill will towards them. Yet it is guaranteed that some will read this essay and automatically bounce to some such belief or accusation in their minds. The growing complexity of our world and social reality demands that we police ourselves as well as possible about this, and not further contaminate already thorny debates with emotionalized conclusions. Restraint is a virtue here. Getting clear about the intricacies of a situation should more and more become a pre-requisite before entering the fray of heated discussions. (And I am not claiming to be entirely innocent of this.)

A useful example arises in the advances that software-driven Chess programs have made over the past fifteen years and how this has been generally reported and what its actual significances are. To clarify up front I am not a chess person per se. Maybe the last serious chess game I took part in was thirty or forty years back. I do like the game however and think it is a very interesting cultural artifact of human civilizations, having originated in what used to be called Persia and India 1400 years ago. And I am interested in AI, especially in terms of how people relate to it, including its often half-crazed evangelists/creators. What happened was that in 1996 IBMs massive program Deep Blue defeated world champion Garik Kasparov in a game. Kasparov went on to win the match against the program 4-2, but the cat was out of the bag. Within two decades the supremacy of human players completely evaporated. It is useful to understand the progress of chess software in three layers or stages. Deep Blue was a massively parallel computer system developed by a team of expert chess players and expert programmers. Countless man-hours to develop and test. It could calculate about 200 million (!) potential moves ahead per second. And rate them according to winning potential weights. It’s actually a wonder Kasparov achieved four victories at first. The second phase, brought on by Google’s AlphaZero, used an entirely new approach involving deep learning (DL). Instead of brute-force computations, engineers codified a way to teach AlphaZero all the rules of chess, exhaustively. Then, employing arrays of neural networks, they set the program to playing a copy of itself over and over millions of times with the instructed goal of getting better and winning. The results astounded the chess world and delighted the AI world, some of whom cannot wait for AI to outduel humanity and supplant us as the top species on the planet, thus beuatifully exemplifying the theory of Darwinian selection. Yay! No chess grandmaster has ever defeated AlphaZero’s full strength version. The final stage, AI programs exemplified by Stockfish can operate on mobile devices and laptops. Chess players use them for training. These benefit from technical advances in neural net and DL over the past decade. (Witness chat-GPT, etc). They continually learn from new program runs and chess games, and they use something called NNUE in which neural nets also operate the evaluation and weighting functions dynamically, updating itself continuously with the benefit of new results. Stockfish easily outduels AlphaZero now. In summary:

— 1) IBM Deep Blue (1997-2006) — Brute force approach

— 2) Google Alpha Zero (2017) — Deep Learning neural net approach

— 3) Mobile Device NNUE, Stockfish (2018-now) — NNUE dynamic updating

But, Does AI Actually Even Play Chess?

In truth, 1996’s Deep Blue doesn’t really deserve the label AI. It didn’t really use recognized AI techniques. It was basically just a massive program with a massive database of stored situations and a dedicated extremely powerful, for the time, parallel computing machine behind it. The later two phases can legit be termed AI however since they employ state-of-the-art DL and NN techniques. OK. But do they play chess? Much less beat humans at chess? What does it mean to play chess? What is a game of chess? I played chess in my 20s in a reasonably competitive setting for a short while. A friend had the idea to start a team of friends and did all the legwork to enter us into local tournaments and so on. I can tell you it can be an extremely intense situation, even when you go into it fairly relaxed. You rapidly get the feeling of hand-to-hand physical combat but on a mental level, when an opponent is deeply engaged in trying to analyze how to crush you two feet away. There’s a clock metering out an hour or so for 40 moves for each player. And when you are ‘on the clock’ in a tense game — you feel it. It is a psychological discipline to not get too affected by this as you calculate. For humans, a chess game is also a cultural and intellectual activity. Friends and those newly met can marvel over new discoveries. Software programs obviously do not experience any of this. At best what they are doing is simulating the playing of chess. But I would not even buy this! What they are doing is a totally different activity than playing a chess game, as a human experiences it. Only by drastically abstracting what the words mean could we claim that AI software programs beat human beings at “playing chess”. This is the kind of concession we make to faked reality which Jaron Lanier warns about. It is stupid and superficial thinking to characterize what software does as playing a game of chess. Yet there is all this fervor around arguing the point. Or guestimating at what point in the future the robots will take over.

Maybe the point can be made more convincingly by revisiting the the realm of athletics, since chess is so intellectual in nature. Suppose that by 2050, robotic athletes, appearing close to humanoid except for the metallic bits, have undergone such advances in physical programming and camera-limb coordination and reaction times that a team of five of them can routinely outscore an NBA championship human team 100 to zero. Same rules, outwardly speaking. The robots are devastating on defense, blocking or stealing almost every pass and shot attempt, and having an error rate of far less than 1% when shooting, and never committing a foul. How interested would you be to watch a playoff series between the androids and NBA humans? It carries no intrigue because what the AI-robots are doing is not “playing a game of basketball”! This is the reality which needs to be discerned, and individuals need to do it starting now.

Full Circle

Happily, or I should say conveniently, we are daily presented on the global stage with starkly vivid examples of what the consequences would be if humanity wholesale goes to sleep on the reality vs. fake horse manure conundrum. The USA has obliged us by sacrificing its collective spirit and placing Trump into a leadership role. I know full well that a certain proportion of Americans and other global wannabes will have absolutely no ability to think in this direction, but I have to address myself to the rest of us, which is still a majority. Human beings absolutely can make themselves stupid enough to accept the fake narratives and scenarios of events. Even a President can do this astonishingly well. Convincing himself that receiving a made-up humanitarian peace award is really an acclamation or honor. Believing or pretending to that photos of bombed fishing boats off the coast of Venezuela show visual proof of piles of floating fentanol even though this drug does not enter the U.S. from the Caribbean. Thinking that Iran wouldn’t have the idea of shutting down Hormuz after being doubly attacked by the U.S. and Israel because the dopes he has placed in power never thought of it either. Being certain that 19th century tariff policy would rocket American economics to the statosphere and not cause even worse inflation because he loves McKinley and hates the idea of a mountain in Alaska being called Denali. Having so little grasp of basic arithmetic that he thinks every demolished Venezuelan fishing boat ‘saves’ 250,000 American lives. Knowing without a doubt that windmills are bad energy policy and kill bald eagles because he thought they looked ugly off the coast of his Scotland golf courses. Clearly it has the potential to become a pandemic, this willful stupidity. In fact, 20% is already pandemic, no?

The hot button challenge right now is not AI. It is AS. Artificial Stupidity.

_______RS

Image : Trump was issued the hastily concocted FIFA Jackass award in February after bitching and moaning about how Obama got the Nobel Peace prize but he didn’t after stopping five, no six, no eight wars. The moron actually beamed proudly afterwards.

► Handy INDEX — scan through all available ||SWR|| articles