Category Archives: Science

Huawei, 5G, and the Man Who Conquered Noise- by Steven Levy

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How an obscure Turkish scientist’s obscure theoretical breakthrough helped the Chinese tech giant gain control of the future. US telecoms never had a chance.

illustration of a city overlaid with wires cash and technology
ILLUSTRATION: MOJO WANG

(A worth reading article on 5G network war between USA and China. Turkish Scientist, Erdal Arikan, discovered “Polar codes” (backbone of 5G network) to transmit high volume data at high speed and without noise error. He offered to US companies, but they refused, but Chinese company, Huawei, jumped on it. It made Huawei a force to reckon with in 5G network. This is the major friction between USA and China, other trade war is just a noise. f.sheikh)

“Polar codes itself is not what’s important,” Erdal continued. “It is a symbol. 5G is totally different than the internet. It’s like a global nervous system. Huawei is the leading company in 5G. They will be around in 10, 20, 50 years—you cannot say that about the US tech companies. In the internet era, the US produced a few trillion-dollar companies. Because of 5G, China will have 10 or more trillion-dollar companies. Huawei and China now have the lead.”

US companies and the US government can no longer expect to beat China back with threats or indictments, even if they are sometimes warranted. And it’s not just telecom companies like Huawei. For all the furor at the highest levels over whether the teen-oriented social app TikTok presented security issues, the real threat to American business was that its Chinese engineers had devised an AI-powered recommendation engine that Silicon Valley had not matched.

Arıkan says the experience has led him to respect Huawei—and to provide a warning to the country where he learned information theory. “I owe a lot to the US,” he says. “I give you friendly advice: You have to accept this as the new reality and deal with it accordingly.”

To paraphrase Shannon: No one knows the future. But Huawei and China now have a hand in controlling it.

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posted by f.sheikh

Has science made religion useless?

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  • Science and religion (fact versus faith) are often seen as two incongruous groups. When you consider the purpose of each and the questions that they seek to answer, the comparison becomes less black and white.
  • This video features religious scholars, a primatologist, a neuroendocrinologist, a comedian, and other brilliant minds considering, among other things, the evolutionary function that religion serves, the power of symbols, and the human need to learn, explore, and know the world around us so that it becomes a less scary place.
  • “I think most people are actually kind of comfortable with the idea that science is a reliable way to learn about nature, but it’s not the whole story and there’s a place also for religion, for faith, for theology, for philosophy,” says Francis Collins, American geneticist and director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). “But that harmony perspective doesn’t get as much attention. Nobody is as interested in harmony as they are in conflict.”

FRANS DE WAAL: Well, religion is an interesting topic because religion is universal. All human societies believe in the supernatural. All human societies have a religion one way or another.

REZA ASLAN: Religion has been a part of the human experience from the beginning. In fact, we can trace the origin of religious experience to before homo sapiens. We can trace it with some measure of confidence to Neanderthals. We can measure it with a little less confidence all the way to homo erectus. So we’re talking hundreds of thousands of years before our species even existed.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Essentially there has been no culture on Earth that has not invented some form of what could be termed meta-magical thinking, attributing things that cannot be seen, faith-based belief systems, things of that sort. It’s universal.

ASLAN: Religious thinking is embedded in our cognitive processes. It is a mode of knowing. We’re born with it. It’s part of our DNA. The question then becomes why. There must be some evolutionary reason for it. There must be a reason, some adaptive advantage to having religious experience or faith experience. Otherwise it wouldn’t exist.

SAPOLSKY: It makes perfect sense why they’ve evolved because they’re wonderful mechanisms for reducing stress. It is an awful, terrifying world out there where bad things happen and we’re all going to die eventually. And believing that there is something, someone responsible for it at least gives some stress reducing attributes built around understanding causality.

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posted by f.sheikh

Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized-By Ragnar Fjelland

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(Great article on Artificial Intelligence (AI) for basic understanding. Computers can perform Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), such as specific jobs of cleaning robots, or car manufacturing robots, but author argues that computers will never learn Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) identical to humans because they do not have the experience of living in human society and acquiring human wisdom and experience. Computers utilizes only correlations to solve a problem, but humans utilize both correlations and causative reasons to reach a conclusion, especially in AGI. AI has made great leaps in correlations and probability, but still lacks in utilizing causative reasoning. f.sheikh)  

“I shall start with Dreyfus’ main argument that AGI cannot be realized. Then I shall give a short account of the development of AI research after his book was published. Some spectacular breakthroughs have been used to support the claim that AGI is realizable within the next few decades, but I will show that very little has been achieved in the realization of AGI. I will then argue that it is not just a question of time, that what has not been realized sooner, will be realized later. On the contrary, I argue that the goal cannot in principle be realized, and that the project is a dead end. In the second part of the paper I restrict myself to arguing that causal knowledge is an important part of humanlike intelligence, and that computers cannot handle causality because they cannot intervene in the world. More generally, AGI cannot be realized because computers are not in the world. As long as computers do not grow up, belong to a culture, and act in the world, they will never acquire human-like intelligence.

Finally, I will argue that the belief that AGI can be realized is harmful. If the power of technology is overestimated and human skills are underestimated, the result will in many cases be that we replace something that works well with something that is inferior.”

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“Genetic Engineering & Super intelligent Humans” By Stephen Hsu

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Lev Landau, a Nobelist and one of the fathers of a great school of Soviet physics, had a logarithmic scale for ranking theorists, from 1 to 5. A physicist in the first class had ten times the impact of someone in the second class, and so on. He modestly ranked himself as 2.5 until late in life, when he became a 2. In the first class were Heisenberg, Bohr, and Dirac among a few others. Einstein was a 0.5!

My friends in the humanities, or other areas of science like biology, are astonished and disturbed that physicists and mathematicians (substitute the polymathic von Neumann for Einstein) might think in this essentially hierarchical way. Apparently, differences in ability are not manifested so clearly in those fields. But I find Landau’s scheme appropriate: There are many physicists whose contributions I cannot imagine having made.

I have even come to believe that Landau’s scale could, in principle, be extended well below Einstein’s 0.5. The genetic study of cognitive ability suggests that there exist today variations in human DNA which, if combined in an ideal fashion, could lead to individuals with intelligence that is qualitatively higher than has ever existed on Earth: Crudely speaking, IQs of order 1,000, if the scale were to continue to have meaning.  In Daniel Keyes’ novel Flowers for Algernon, a mentally challenged adult called Charlie Gordon receives an experimental treatment to raise his IQ from 60 to somewhere in the neighborhood of 200. He is transformed from a bakery worker who is taken advantage of by his friends, to a genius with an effortless perception of the world’s hidden connections. “I’m living at a peak of clarity and beauty I never knew existed,” Charlie writes. “There is no greater joy than the burst of solution to a problem… This is beauty, love, and truth all rolled into one. This is joy.” The contrast between a super-intelligence and today’s average IQ of 100 would be greater still.

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posted by f.sheikh