“Surviving in the Hi-Tech World” follows the many ups and downs of my years as a software developer in the high-tech industry. It provides a window into what it is like to work in the computer field. I worked for many different organizations, from academia and large companies to medium sized companies and startups. The stories weave my work experience with explanations of the technology of the period. In the process, it follows the revolutionary changes in computer hardware and software from large mainframes to personal microcomputers and the evolution of early networks into the global Internet.
Each chapter in the book covers the different jobs and places that I worked. My journey took me from Montreal to London, Glasgow, Wisconsin, Vancouver and Toronto. Each has its own story and series of adventures. There are accounts of some people who became millionaires and some who went to jail.
DALL-E, a text to image AI model, was opened to the general public in 2022. The result was a tsunami of additional image generators, to the point that the total number of AI images being created is estimated to be 34 million images every day. Even people who are not especially interested in art have probably seen some of the now classic AI art images, such as scenes of space fantasy, dystopian worlds, super heroes, surreal compositions and idealized models, usually female.
This is all missing some really wonderful uses for AI generated images.
After many years reading about science, I realized that I didn’t have a good idea of what a lot of famous scientists looked like. Statues or portraits of people from hundreds of years ago were generally pretty poor quality and very fuzzy. Even after photography arrived there were often not very many good pictures.
Now with generative, AI you can fill in the missing images.
If you do a Google image search for Charles Darwin, you will get a lot of grainy images of a very old man with a very large bushy beard.
To put him in a more meaningful context, I used the Leonardo.AI image generator with the following prompt: “Charles Darwin on the HMS Beagle”. I wondered if the question might be taken literally and I would get a portrait of a man riding on a dog. But the AI was smart enough to understand that the Beagle was a ship. This produced a vastly more satisfying portrait.
Next I was interested in a picture of Albert Einstein. There are many pictures of him but they tend to be of an older man with wild hair. So I asked for a drawing of “A young Albert Einstein”. Here’s what I got.
Not quite what I expected. It looked like an Einstein baby face with the wild gray hair of his older pictures. So I modified the request and asked for “A young Albert Einstein working in the patent office”.
I couldn’t quite make out what all those strange instruments on the desk were but it did look like a photo from 1902.
Next I decided to step back in history and try something a little more challenging. Euclid was a giant in mathematics. His axiomatic and deductive analysis of geometry established a fundamental logical basis for mathematical reasoning. There seems to have been only a few stylistic drawings of Euclid from the Middle Ages; not very interesting or revealing. So I asked the AI to do a picture of “Euclid teaching students in the Parthenon”. Here is the result which is what I imagine Euclid might have looked like in a historical context.
Another famous Greek scientist who was a mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer and inventor, was Archimedes. There’s a famous story of the king who gave him a crown that had been made for him but he wanted to know if the goldsmith had cheated him by substituting some cheaper silver for some of the gold. Archimedes knew that if he could calculate the volume of the crown, he could compare the weight of the crown to the weight an equal volume of gold on a scale. If the crown was lighter it would prove that a cheaper metal had been substituted for some of the gold.
While taking a bath Archimedes realized that the water in the tub rose by an amount equal to the volume of his body. He could submerged the crown in a bucket of water and the amount that the water rose would be the volume of the crown. Archimedes was so excited by this discovery, which came to be called Archimedes Principle, that he jumped out of the bath and ran naked through the street shouting “Eureka”.
Here’s the first drawing I got from the AI when I asked for this image.
I didn’t think that looked like a very good picture of Archimedes at all, so I asked the AI to generate some more images. With generative AI tools, you typically get several images for each request. With Leonardo.AI I generally got four images at the same time and they could all be quite different. In addition, you can ask it to repeat your request and you will get a different result, not the same thing over and over.
However, I seemed to continually be getting this cartoon caricature. It struck me that perhaps the training data for the AI had included a lot of images from some cartoon version of Archimedes. So I modified my request and asked for “The real historical Greek Archimedes jumping out of the bath”. This produced this rather dramatic picture. I preume that the object that Archimedes is holding is supposed to be the crown. If so, the king must have had a rather strangely shaped head.
Most people know that Leonardo da Vinci was an artist who painted two of the most famous masterpieces in the world: the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. I always admired Leonardo more as the ultimate “Renaissance Man”. Besides being an artist, he was also a scientist, philosopher, engineer, and mathematician.
Leonardo studied many things and his observations and drawings fill many notebooks, containing over 10,000 pages. Some of the things found in Leonardo’s work relate to geology, anatomy, the flight of birds, how water flows with designs for dams and canals, botany and various flying inventions such as a helicopter, a parachute and a hang glider.
Here is Leonardo AI’s image of Leonardo the Engineer working on one of his designs for a flying machine.
A gallery of famous scientists would not be complete without a picture of Isaac Newton.Most images of Newton on the Internet are formal portraits of a middle aged man with very long hair. Most people know the story of Newton’s discovery of gravity by watching an apple fall from a tree so to try and see Newton in the context of history, I asked for a picture of “a young Isaac Newton thinking under an apple tree”. I thought this result was quite lovely.
But among the several other images that the AI presented was the following. I guess the AI had used training data that had some pictures of a dog named Newton that had been posted on the Internet.
One of the greatest and most prolific mathematicians in history was Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) but he is unknown to many people. Some may know that the symbol e for the base of natural logarithms which occurs in many mathematical formulas is named for him. A few more may know about Euler’s Identity, named in a poll as the most beautiful theorem in mathematics.
eiπ + 1 = 0
Euler lived in Konigsberg, Prussia for a few years. The town had seven bridges that connected two islands and the other side of the river. It was a local challenge to see if anyone could go on a walk that would cross each bridge exactly once.
Euler proved that such a walk was impossible. While this may not have been one of the most important problems for a great mathematical mind like Euler, in fact it was significant. His solution involved abstracting the problem and it laid the foundation for graph theory and topology as mathematical disciplines. The Seven Bridges of Königsberg
To present Euler in an interesting historical context, I asked the AI for a picture of “Leonhard Euler crossing the Konigsberg bridge”.
A famous name in the history of computers is Ada Lovelace (1815-1852). Her math tutor introduced her to Charles Babbage, a mathematician who was also active as an astronomer. He was building a mechanical calculator which incorporated many mechanisms that were similar to a modern computer. Ada was fascinated by this and worked with him on some of the programs that they were developing to calculate various mathematical tables. Babbage’s Difference Engine is considered to be one of the first computers and Ada Lovelace is considered to be one of the first computer programmers. Here is a generated picture of Ada Lovelace operating the Babbage Difference Engine.
If you’ve ever visited St John’s Newfoundland, you may have trekked up to Signal Hill to see the stunning views overlooking St John’s Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean. Signal Hill is a National Historic Site of Canada. There was a major battle between the French and English in 1762 but to my mind a more significant event that occurred there was the first transatlantic radio communication.
Guglielmo Marconi had been experimenting with “wireless telegraphy” since he was a young man. In 1994 he built a radio transmitter that could ring a bell on the other side of a room. A few years later he was successful in sending the first wireless communication over the open sea and in 1899 he transmitted a signal across the English Channel. Marconi then built a high powered station in Cornwall and prepared an experiment to transmit a signal across the Atlantic Ocean. Marconi traveled to Signal Hill to witness the reception. Here is a generated image of that historic moment.
However, if you look closely, there are two dignitaries standing by the radio receiver, and they both look like Guglielmo, as does a third man seated to the right. But there is no record that there were Marconi triplets. This is another case of how AI, still in its early days, makes mistakes.
No one should need an introduction to Marie Curie and her discovery of radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two scientific fields (Physics 1903, Chemistry 1911). As such she was famous in her lifetime and there are many photographs of her. However I was able to generate this rather dramatic picture of her by asking for “Marie Curie discovering radioactivity in her lab.”
Another scientist investigating radioactivity was Ernest Rutherford. He discovered the element radon and alpha and beta radiation, among many other things. He was the first one to “split the atom” which he did by bombarding nitrogen with alpha particles that triggered the emission of protons. Rutherford was awarded the Nobel prize in 1908 and came to be known as “the father of nuclear physics”. In spite of his many accomplishments, he is not that well known outside of the field. I added “Sir” Ernest Rutherford to my gallery, not because of a shared belief in “The Importance of Being Earnest”, a rather Wilde play deserving of an Oscar, but because I had a more fateful connection with him.
Rutherford was a professor at McGill for a few years around the turn of the century and he did a lot of experiments in radioactivity in his lab in the physics building. When I entered McGill, word had it that he had contaminated the building with his radiation experiments. That old building still existed and is where I went for my physics classes and labs. Working in a radioactive lab may have earned Sir Ernest a Nobel Prize, but I don’t think it did me any good.
In 1928 Margaret Mead published the book “Coming of Age in Samoa”. This work challenged prevailing notions about human development and emphasized the importance of cultural context. It launched Mead as a pioneering researcher and she became the most famous anthropologist in the world. Mead set new standards for anthropology fieldwork through her detailed observation methods and use of photography, film and psychological testing.
Here is the result of asking for a picture of Margaret Mead in Samoa. This is very realistic and looks like an actual photo. However I did a Google image search and there is nothing like this photo on the Internet.
Many people learned about Alan Turing from the Hollywood film “The Imitation Game” that was nominated for eight Academy Awards in 2004. However, Turing was not well known in his lifetime, because the story of breaking the German code Enigma in World War II was classified for many years after the war. The first public revelation came in 1974 but the role of Alan Turing and others at Bletchley Park did not become known until the 1980s and 1990s as more documents were declassified.
The general impression given in the movie and in the media is that to break the Enigma code Turing invented one of the first computers. This is not accurate because the machine he built, “the Bombe”, was not really a computer but more of a specialized electromechanical device that could rapidly test multiple possible settings of the Enigma machine. There was another team at Bletchley Park working on breaking a different German encryption code that did design and build a machine, the Colossus, that in fact was one of the first computers ever built.
Here’s an AI generated picture of “Alan Turing breaking the code on an Enigma cipher machine”.
Another scientist of the World War 2 era who was featured in a major Hollywood movie was J. Robert Oppenheimer. The film “Oppenheimer” received 13 Academy Awards nominations and won 7 Oscars in 2024.
Oppenheimer first started his graduate studies in Cambridge but he was not adept with the laboratory work. To complete his Phd he went to the University of Göttingen, one of the leading centers of theoretical physics. At the time Europe was the center of the new age of quantum physics whereas American physicists were more experimental. During his time in Europe, Oppenheimer met many of the leading theoretical physicists in the world. When he was later recruited for the Manhattan Project he became a wise choice to be the head of development at Los Alamos since he could recruit many of the top physicists in the world, such as Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Niels Bohr, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam.
During the war the development of an atomic bomb was top secret but after bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer became a well known public figure.
There were a lot of photographs of Oppenheimer so I asked for an AI generated sketch portrait instead of a photograph. Most image generators have a number of different styles that you can use, such as photographic, cinematic, concept art, graphic design and sketch drawings. Here’s the portrait of Oppenheimer which is quite good as a drawing and has a very good likeness to photos of him.
I also tried a few pictures of Oppenheimer at work. Here’s the result of asking for “Oppenheimer inspecting the nuclear test bomb Fat Man in the desert at Los Alamos.”
I have no idea how the AI went so far off the rails on this one. Maybe there were some training data images of garden statues that were called “Fat Man”. In the AI world, these sorts of wild errors have come to be called hallucinations.
Oppenheimer was a great movie in many regards in portraying many of the brilliant scientists who were working on one of the great scientific projects in history. However, there was one really glaring omission. The film never mentioned John von Neumann, one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century. Von Neumann was the youngest person ever appointed to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1933 at the age of 29, the same year that Albert Einstein was appointed, at age 54. Many of the top scientists who worked with von Neumann had stories or comments about his genius. Hans Bethe, one of the key physicists on the Manhattan Project, said “I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann’s does not indicate a species superior to that of man”.
Von Neumann was not part of the Los Alamos team. When the bomb design ran into a critical problem, Oppenheimer contacted von Neumann to become a consultant to the Manhattan Project. Johnny had been the first to establish a rigorous mathematical framework for quantum mechanics. He developed a mathematical model of the atomic reactions and worked with the physicists at Loa Alamos to design an implosion that would trigger the chain reaction that would produce an atomic bomb.
On one of von Neumann’s long train trips to Los Alamos, he wrote a paper describing the design for a computer. One of his revolutionary ideas was to use memory to store the program. This allowed the computer to be reprogrammed for different tasks without rewiring the physical hardware. This stored-program design came to be known as the von Neumann architecture.
Von Neumann began a project at the Institute of Advanced Studies to build such a computer. He published progress reports and many other projects around the world used this information to design and build their own computers, notably IBM’s first computer, the IBM 701 that was released in 1952. Since then, almost all computers, from mainframes to micro computers to mobile phones are fundamentally von Neumann architecture machines.
Here’s the AI generated picture of John Von Neumann programming the IAS computer at Princeton.
Overall, I would give image generation AI a score of maybe 7/10. Some of the results are quite stunning, dramatic and accurate. On the other hand, there are many that miss the mark and occasionally go off the rails.
It’s clear to see that in spite of the hype about AI and worries about it taking over jobs and controlling the world, AI has a long way to go and is not ready for prime time. Except for some cases, like Newton the dog, Einstein the baby and Fat Man the garden statue, which are ready for prime time, on the comedy channel.
In a matter of only a few weeks the Covid subvariant JN.1 has become the dominant Covid strain in Canada and the U.S. Although the WHO declared it a variant of interest it is not thought to pose a new high risk. However it does seem to be spreading quickly. JN.1 Here’s what to know
There is waning immunity to Covid in the population but only about 15% of people have gotten one of the updated XBB.1.5 vaccines that became available in September 2023. Fewer and fewer people are taking personal precautions to minimize contact. I have been amazed at the number of people, especially seniors, who no longer wear masks in enclosed spaces like stores, theaters and public transit.
In Canada an increase in hospitalizations has not shown up in the December statistics but a year ago a large spike in hospitalizations occurred in January/February. Canada Covid-19 epidemiology update
In the U.S. there has been a 50% increase in hospitalizations among people age 70+ since November. New York Times Covid-19 Tracker
Anybody who is 65 or older or has underlying health conditions is at risk for severe Covid. Many of these people know about Paxlovid, an antiviral drug that can be taken to combat Covid if you test positive. However only 10% of these people at risk take Paxlovid.
Paxlovid does not kill the Covid virus. It prevents the virus from replicating, thereby reducing the severity of the infection. To be effective it must be started very early before the Covid virus has replicated widely and is causing serious illness.
Paxlovid received FDA emergency use authorization in December 2021 based on clinical trial data that significantly reduced hospitalization and death. In a very large study in the U.S. there was a 26% reduction in hospitalization and 73% reduction in death for patients who took Paxlovid. The study used an extremely large sample of one million cases from the National Covid database, so the results are statistically very significant. If half of the patients eligible for Paxlovid had taken it during the period of the study 135,000 hospitalizations and 48,000 deaths could have been prevented. Paxlovid effectiveness against hospitalization and death
The procedure to get Paxlovid varies by location. In Ontario it couldn’t be easier. If you test positive for Covid and it is within five days of your first symptoms, all you need to do is call your pharmacy. The pharmacist will ask you a short screening questionnaire over the phone. If you meet all the conditions and are not taking a medication that is contraindicated, she will issue a prescription that you can probably get in an hour.
Why did so many people choose not to use Paxlovid?
There seem to be a number of reasons that people who tested positive for Covid did not opt for Paxlovid.
– Some people delayed because they thought their Covid was mild. Then when Covid really came on in the second week, it was too late to use Paxlovid. – Some people were wary of a “Paxlovid rebound” – initially the medicine worked but later on there was a resurgence of Covid. This was an early observation but it has not been borne out by more recent studies. – Many people do not consider that they are at high risk for severe Covid even though they are 65+ or have a health condition like asthma, diabetes or obesity. – Other people are worried about the side effects such as an unpleasant aftertaste, stomach upset or muscle aches. None of the side effects are very serious and the Paxlovid treatment is only 5 days. People Who Need Paxlovid Are Not Taking It
Altogether these don’t seem to be very good arguments for not using Paxlovid compared to the very significant reduction of risk of hospitalization and death. But then we are living in an age where science is not trusted and people don’t make rational decisions.
We have now without a doubt entered the Artificial Intelligence (AI) era of history. In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) and by January 2023, it had become the fastest-growing consumer software application in history with over 100 million users.
Content Generation: Writing articles or blog posts. Creating creative writing, including stories and poems. Drafting emails or other written correspondence. Idea Generation: Brainstorming ideas for projects. Generating creative concepts for art or design. Learning Assistance: Getting explanations and clarifications on various topics. Studying and practicing languages. Programming Help: Writing and debugging code. Seeking advice on programming concepts. Problem Solving: Generating solutions for problems or challenges. Planning and strategizing. Conversation and Social Interaction: Having casual conversations for entertainment. Simulating characters for role-playing. Language Translation: Translating text between languages. Entertainment: Playing text-based games. Creating and participating in interactive stories. Assistance with Tasks: Creating to-do lists or drafting documents. Getting help with decision-making. General Information: Looking up general information on a wide range of topics. Therapeutic Conversations: Engaging in therapeutic conversations or journaling.
Suppose you wanted to write an essay about the effect of the French Revolution on the world, a popular question I remember from high school history. There is a lot of information about the French Revolution easily available on the Internet. Here is lovely illustrated history but it would be quite a lot of work to distill this down to a well written one page essay.
I asked ChatGPT to Write a one page essay on the effect of the French Revolution on the world.
After about 5 seconds this printed out on my screen.
The Global Ripple Effect of the French Revolution
Introduction: The French Revolution, which unfolded between 1789 and 1799, stands as one of the most influential events in world history. Its impact reverberated far beyond the borders of France, shaping political ideologies, inspiring movements for change, and redefining the global balance of power. The aftermath of the revolution left an indelible mark on the world, influencing social, political, and economic structures across continents.
Political Ideals and Nationalism: The French Revolution introduced a fervent call for liberty, equality, and fraternity, setting a precedent for the assertion of individual rights and the dismantling of traditional hierarchies. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen became a beacon for democratic aspirations, transcending borders and inspiring movements for independence and self-determination in colonies and nations worldwide. The revolutionary fervor paved the way for the rise of nationalism, as people sought to define their identity and destiny independent of monarchies or imperial rule.
Napoleonic Code and Legal Reforms: Napoleon Bonaparte, emerging from the chaos of the Revolution, consolidated power and implemented far-reaching legal reforms. The Napoleonic Code, a comprehensive legal system, spread across Europe and beyond, influencing legal structures and principles in diverse societies. The code emphasized equality before the law, property rights, and secularism, leaving an enduring legacy in legal systems around the world.
Shift in Global Power Dynamics: The French Revolution significantly altered the geopolitical landscape of Europe. The rise and fall of Napoleon led to a redrawing of borders and the reconfiguration of power dynamics. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 aimed to restore stability and maintain a balance of power, but the revolutionary ideals had already set in motion a trajectory towards nationalism and the eventual reshaping of empires.
Social and Economic Transformations: The revolutionary fervor extended beyond politics to encompass social and economic realms. Feudal structures crumbled, and new economic systems emerged. Industrialization, spurred by the Enlightenment ideas that fueled the Revolution, gained momentum, transforming societies and economies. The impact reached as far as the Americas, where the ideals of the French Revolution influenced independence movements and the formation of new nations.
Legacy and Lessons: The French Revolution left an enduring legacy, contributing to the evolution of modern political thought and the establishment of democratic ideals. It taught the world the power of collective action, the potential for radical change, and the need for a balance between stability and progress. While the revolution had its share of excesses and challenges, its enduring impact on the world underscores the complex interplay between revolutionary fervor and the quest for a just and equitable society.
Conclusion: In conclusion, the French Revolution’s effect on the world is immeasurable. Its ideals and principles echoed across continents, shaping the course of history and inspiring generations to come. From the rise of nationalism to the restructuring of legal and political systems, the French Revolution’s impact on the world is a testament to the transformative power of ideas and the indomitable spirit of those who dare to challenge the status quo.
From my vague memory of this history this seems like a pretty good answer, complete with a catchy title. However I don’t think the answer is nearly as good as the one given by a Chinese historian, a scholar of one of the oldest human civilizations, who is reputed to have said when asked about the importance of the French Revolution,
“It’s too soon to tell.”
There were a lot of articles and videos about many different things that people were doing with ChatGPT. I thought that some of it was hype. In particular, I was dubious about the claims that ChatGPT could write anything much more than a very simple computer program. I was browsing an online introduction to an AI course from Harvard which used as an example of AI programming the problem of how to find a path through a maze. Over a sequence of several lectures the course developed a Python program to solve such a maze. I then asked ChatGPT to write a Python program to solve a maze. I was amazed!
ChatGPT produced an 80 line program that was quite different from the Harvard course and was pretty good code. I ran it against several different mazes to test it, and it did work.
Anything that’s hot gets copied pretty quickly. Besides the big players like Google, Facebook and Microsoft there are a whole host of chatbots now on the internet. Here’s one list of The best AI chatbots, but there are many other lists.
I have only tried a few of these. One that is listed as best “For fun”, character.ai allows you to converse with all kinds of characters from Socrates to Napoleon to Albert Einstein to Elon Musk.
The startup behind Pi, the one listed as best “For personal use”, believes that every website will be adding a chatbot which will enable visitors to their website to find information easily and quickly. For a company, this could streamline and extend the reach of their marketing and customer support. Pi also believes that their chatbox will be widely used by individuals as a personal assistant. Many people tried to use Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant as personal assistants but their “intelligence” and abilities were quite limited, at the level of a grade school child. Chatboxes based on the new AI will offer capabilities of a college graduate. Who would you choose to hire for a personal assistant? How Siri, Alexa and Google lost the AI race
Another very popular application of the new AI is image generation. You provide a description (prompt) of what you want to draw and some parameters about the type of drawing and the AI program will pick images and elements from its training data to produce a result. Here’s a great article that shows many examples of what some of the leading image generators can do. Image Generators Compared
Unlike most of the chatbots which seem to be free, many of the image generators require a subscription. I found a free image generator that I quite liked called Leonardo.AI, although I think I was partial to the name. By all accounts Leonardo da Vinci was one of the most brilliant and talented people to have ever lived.
Leonardo has been very handy to quickly and easily make greeting cards and birthday cards for printing or email. Here’s the New Year’s card I made for 2024. I simply provided the following prompt.
Happy New Year wishes encompassing the theme of peace on Earth and a healthy planet.
It generated four different images in about 10 seconds and I picked the one that I liked the best.
You can see a current weakness of AI image generators on this card. They all have trouble incorporating text accurately. “Happy New Year” is legible but is followed by some gibberish; I really don’t have a clue what it says. This is still early days for the new AI.
I engaged Leonardo for another task, to design a logo for my theoretical AI Consulting business. Here’s the prompt that I gave:
Design a logo for my AI consulting business. It should be deep blue and have the letter D surrounded with interconnected nodes in a circle that reflect the neural networks of AI systems.
This looks like a really good logo to me. Maybe I should actually startup this business.
Of course there has been a lot of press about how ChatGPT makes it easy for students to cheat, how it will take over many jobs and lead to people getting fired, increase the threat and spread of fake news, and generally have disastrous effects on the economy and society.
A lot of people from many walks of life have become engaged in the debate about the dangers of AI. In 2014 Stephen Hawking warned about the growing power of Artificial Intelligence that would enable robots to replicate themselves and increase the rate at which they get smarter, leading to a tipping point or ‘technological singularity’ when they can outsmart humans.
Ray Kurzweil, one of the most prolific inventors alive and the author of five books on Artificial Intelligence, replied to Hawking and pointed out that the industry guidelines developed for DNA research have kept that field safe and the same can be done for AI. Don’t Fear Artificial Intelligence
One of the people who was concerned about the direction of AI was Elon Musk. His concern was that the large companies would control the development of AI and keep the technology secret. To counter this, he and a group of other like minded tech people founded OpenAI. Their mission was to do advanced AI research but keep it in the public domain “to empower as many people as possible to have AI. If everyone has AI powers, then there’s not any one person or a small set of individuals who can have AI superpower.”
Fear of robots and computers taking over the world goes way back in science fiction. This was the theme in the film “2001: A Space Odyssey” that burst onto the big screen in 1968. It follows the evolution of intelligence, transcending from ape to caveman and then from modern man to the computer HAL. But then HAL goes rogue and causes one of the astronauts to drift away in space before the other astronaut is able to shut HAL down.
2001 was great entertainment but it was not great science. HAL would not have been a threat to the astronauts if it had been designed to follow the The Three Laws of Robotics. These were published by Isaac Asimov in 1942. 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
In 2023 the debate about the future of AI continued at a heated pace. In March more than 1,000 technology leaders and researchers published an open letter warning that AI tools present “profound risks to society and humanity” and urged AI labs to pause development of the most advanced systems.
In December 2023 the European Parliament passed a First Regulation on Artificial Intelligence. This is fairly broad legislation that establishes obligations on companies developing and using AI that depend on the level of risk.
Unacceptable risk AI systems are systems considered a threat to people and will be banned. – Cognitive behavioral manipulation of people – Social scoring: classifying people based on behavior, socio-economic status or personal characteristics – Biometric identification and categorisation of people
High risk systems will have to be registered in an EU database. - Systems that negatively affect safety or fundamental rights
General purpose and generative AI systems have to: – Disclose that the content was generated by AI – Design the model to prevent it from generating illegal content – Publish summaries of copyrighted data used for trainingGeneral-purpose
AI models that might pose systemic risk have to undergo thorough evaluations and any serious incidents have to be reported.
Canada and the U.S. are also preparing AI legislation.
My view is that many of the “experts” (physicists, philosophers, historians, journalists, politicians) who are sounding the alarm about AI do not have an in-depth knowledge of software/technology and the psychology/neuropsychology of human intelligence to fully comprehend how difficult the problem of advancing to general intelligence is. They underestimate how long it will take and amplify fears expressed by others.
The current AI boom is fueled by a breakthrough in deep learning which is fundamentally advanced pattern recognition. AI models today are not very strong in analysis, reasoning and logic which are key components of human intelligence. These critical characteristics of advanced general intelligence are more difficult to achieve than pattern recognition. The number of breakthroughs necessary to achieve general intelligence stretches far into the future. Climbing a tree can take a monkey nearer to the moon, but climbing taller and taller trees does not enable a simian astronaut to plant a flag on the moon.
Artificial Intelligence is not new. It began way back in the 1950s when the term was coined. There were a number of early dramatic successes, such as a program that played championship level checkers and a program that could prove many of the symbolic logic theorems in Principia Mathematica, the monumental classic on the foundations of mathematics. These successes convinced many in the field that AI was going to revolutionize the world and a boom in AI began. However the hype raced ahead of reality and the boom turned to bust in the 1970s.
A second AI boom occurred in the 1980s. The focus was on “Expert Systems” in which input from experts in a particular subject area was entered into a system which could then respond to user queries and provide expert answers. A number of such expert systems were successfully used, from hardware circuit design to medical diagnosis. But as in the first AI boom, many of the prototype systems failed to scale to real life applications and meet the hyped expectations so investment dried up and the boom was over.
Will the AI boom today escape AI’s past history?
The current boom in AI began in 2012 when a program to recognize images in a database containing more than 20,000 categories won the annual ImageNet competition. The software had been developed by Geoffrey Hinton and several graduate students at the University of Toronto using a technique that was called “Deep Learning”. It achieved 85% accuracy, a very significant improvement over previous years.
Deep learning was a type of neural network that had been used as a model for AI research since it was first developed in 1960 by the psychologist Frank Rosenblatt. Anybody who took a psychology course at McGill University back in the day would be familiar with the idea of a neural net. It is based on D. O. Hebb’s neuropsychological theory of how learning occurs in the brain, which can be summarized by the pithy statement “Neurons that fire together wire together”.
The success of deep learning triggered a whole new wave of AI research. After decades of research and millions of dollars spent by IBM and others, progress in speech recognition had been slow. Applying deep learning resulted in a breakthrough and enabled computers to understand the spoken word in real time. This success was the basis for Siri and Alexa and the voice recognition used by telephone answering services.
But a new era only occurs when a revolutionary development (based on prior breakthroughs) changes life for many people. So although the current AI boom began in 2012, the AI era didn’t really begin until 10 years later with ChatGPT.
In fact there have been 5 eras in the evolution of computers since the first early machines.
1951 First Commercial Computers — after the first working computers were developed during World War II in government research labs and universities, general purpose computers became available from many different companies in the U.S., Europe and Japan. Their rapid growth was triggered by the invention of the transistor in 1947, an invention which many people have called the most important invention of the 20th century. The transistor, which functions as a switch, is at the heart of electronics design. It replaced vacuum tubes and made computers a lot smaller, faster, cheaper and more reliable.
1964 IBM Mainframe Era — the IBM System/360 family of compatible computers allowed customers to start with a small system and upgrade to larger computers as their computing needs grew. The success of System/360 drove many computer vendors out of the market and established IBM as a dominating force in the computer industry for the next 30 years.
1981 Microcomputer Era — Intel invented memory chips and CPU chips in 1970/71 which gave birth to microcomputers such as the Apple I. But the revolution in the widespread use of microcomputers that defined the era only started with the IBM Personal Computer (PC) in 1981.
1995 Internet Era — the Internet was first built in 1969 as a research project under a grant from the U.S. Department of Defense, but widespread use of the Internet did not occur until after the World Wide Web was developed in 1991 and Microsoft Windows 95 made it easy for non-technical users to access the Internet with simple point and click.
2007 Smartphone Era — the first smartphone was developed by IBM in 1994 and was followed by the BlackBerry in 2002. But the general Smartphone era really began with the revolutionary Apple iPhone in 2007 which led to widespread mobile computing for almost everyone .
2022 Artificial Intelligence Era — ChatGPT and other chatbots came out of the lab and into widespread use following the breakthrough successes of deep learning.
It seems there is a new era in technology on average every 14 years.
What will the next era be 14 years from now in 2038?
I predict the next era will be Personal Robots (PR) or Personal Medicine (PM).
It is a natural extension of AI to herald a revolution in robots. Robots are not new. The first programmable robot was used in a General Motors plant in 1961. Robots are now in fairly wide use but they are generally designed for very specialized industrial jobs. There is a lot of research into making general purpose robots, especially in Japan, the largest exporter of robots in the world. Japan’s declining population has spurred the government to invest heavily in robot technology to provide their future workforce. Japan’s robots are conquering the world
Personal Medicine is where medical decisions and interventions are tailored to an individual. Some of the breakthrough discoveries that are the foundation for this advance have already been made.
The Human Genome Project that identified, mapped and sequenced almost all of the genes of the human genome was completed in 2003. This opened the way for gene therapy and genetic engineering.
CAR T cell therapy is a gene therapy in which T cells, one of the important components of the immune system, are taken from cancer patients, genetically modified to contain receptors that will attach to cancer cells and re-infused into patients. The modified T cells are then able to locate cancer cells and destroy them. The first CAR T cell therapy approved by the FDA was in 2017 for the treatment of childhood leukemia. Following this success, several more CAR T therapies were approved for other types of leukemia and other blood cancers.
In 2023 AlphaFold won the Lasker Award for solving a 50 year old problem in biology to accurately predict the shape of a protein molecule. In a very short time AlphaFold has proved to be an invaluable tool in many areas of medical research. The program and the database of 200 million structure predictions, amounting for nearly all the known human proteins, have been shared with the scientific community and more than 300,000 science researchers have used these resources. AlphaFold is one of the most significant achievements in the history of Artificial Intelligence. The story of this breakthrough was unfolded in an earlier blog article.
CRISPR is a revolutionary technique to edit genes that was discovered in 2012. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier discovered that Cas9, a gene-cutting protein used by bacteria to kill viruses, can be re-engineered as a programmable gene editing tool. The CRISPR-Cas9 system is faster, more accurate and more efficient than previous gene editing methods. Doudna and Charpentier were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020.
The following short video is a good demonstration of how CRISPR does “cut and paste” gene editing. CRISPR Explained
In 2013 Charpentier co-founded a startup company called (surprise, surprise) CRISPR Therapeutics. They undertook developing treatments for several diseases and conducting them through clinical trials. In 2023 their treatment for sickle cell disease received FDA approval. This is the world’s first approved medicine based on CRISPR gene editing. Many people think this is a groundbreaking achievement opening the way for a lot of new CRISPR developed medicines. CRISPR Gene Editing Breakthroughs
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So here are three possible scenarios for 2038.
1. You order the PR (Personal Robot) that everybody is buying and an hour later it arrives from Amazon by drone delivery. After a friendly introduction, you ask it to do the laundry and then prepare a gourmet lunch while you get back to more important things in life.
2. After going to your doctor for a checkup, she informs you that the diagnostic tests that you took have identified a rare disorder. She has submitted all the test results and your medical history to the PM department (Personal Medicine) at the hospital. In three days you are notified that a drug has been made to treat your medical condition and that you need to come into the hospital for a three day initiation. Possible side effects cannot be completely predicted yet by Personal Medicine so you need to be under observation in case you need intervention.
3. Continuing scenario 3, you get ready to depart for the hospital for your new PM drug treatment program but there is a howling windstorm and torrential rain that make it impossible for anybody to travel. Because the world did not move quickly enough to meet the target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C by 2030, extreme weather events are happening frequently and continue for weeks. You are shut indoors while your health condition deteriorates and you wonder if you will get your new miracle drug on time. (more on climate change in a future blog)
It’s time for international intervention where real genocide is occurring.
There are estimates of as many as 500,000 people murdered in the Darfur region of Sudan since 2003. Here’s a PBS report from June 2023. Battle in Sudan reignites conflict in Darfur
There are an estimated 43,000 Rohingyas who have been murdered in Myanmar since 2016. Here’s a Human Rights Watch report from July 2023. Spiraling Violence Against Rohingya Refugees
The war in Gaza will probably end soon and there will be a ceasefire.
But why were Leftists everywhere protesting the war in Gaza with an international outcry for a ceasefire only a few weeks after Israel retaliated for a horrific massacre, when there has been nary a peep against real genocide and the many other wars that have been going on for years?
There were over 230,000 deaths in 2022 from armed conflicts in the world. There have been about 20,000 deaths in the Gaza war. Why doesn’t the carnage of innocent civilians in the rest of the world matter?
When it comes to Human Rights, the Left is so hypocritical they are morally bankrupt.
Almost two years ago I started to have a lot of stomach upset, a condition that is called Irritable Bowel Syndrome – IBS. Dealing with it has been a long learning path. Even if you don’t have any gastrointestinal issues, you may find it interesting to read this account. It demonstrates how – Modern medicine still relies a lot on trial and error – Why doing your own research is important – How to collaborate with your doctor to find solutions to health problems
I never had a history of gastrointestinal (GI) problems. But with age and perhaps reactions to medicines, things change. I developed a typical gamut of gut (stomach) problems – cramps, gas, bloating, diarrhea. The pain and discomfort were not that severe but their erratic and sudden occurence created havoc with my daily life. I had accidents on occasions when I was out somewhere and was not able to get to a bathroom in time. I restricted some activities and most travel was out of the question.
I tended to have more stomach upset in the morning so I grew suspicious of some of my breakfast foods. I eliminated eggs and coffee from my diet. Eggs are very rich and coffee is well known to be a possible irritant of the GI tract. It wasn’t that hard for me to give up coffee. I had never gotten into the gourmet coffee grind and I never went to Starbucks. I also never liked coffee all that much, but it made milk and sugar taste good and went well with dessert. It was hard to tell if these changes in diet helped very much because my symptoms persisted and continued to be very erratic and unpredictable.
Yhe next thing I tried was yogurt. I had long been a big believer and promoter of yogurt, ever since my student days when I had founded the Underground Yogurt Co-op (but that is another story). I was no longer eating yogurt regularly so I added it to my breakfast. Disappointingly this did not have the magic outcome that I had professed in my younger days.
Next I upped my game to a probiotic. My wife had seen a gastroenterologist a number of years earlier about IBS symptoms and he had recommended Align, which had worked well for her.
Probiotics are live bacteria and yeasts that supplement the bacteria that inhabit your GI tract and play an important part in digestion. A number of foods such as yogurt contain probiotics but there are probiotic supplements that have more bacteria than you get from food. I took Align for several months but it did not seem to help me very much.
There are up to 1000 different types of bacteria in the GI tract. Which ones are the ones that are important for helping with IBS? I found this really comprehensive article about The Best Probiotics for IBS that had a guideline. Based on your symptoms, it recommended a particular type of probiotic.
Going through its checklist, I selected and found a probiotic containing Lactobacillus acidophilus. After what I thought had been such good research, I had high hopes for this probiotic. But it turned out to be an example of the gap between theory and practice. In practice this supplement exacerbated my cramps and diarrhea and I had to stop using it.
The next thing I tried was Metamucil. I had seen it recommended in a number of articles about IBS. Metamucil is a fiber supplement that is typically used daily to prevent constipation. It seems contradictory to take it when your digestive problems are the opposite, namely diarrhea. However it does seem that making sure you have enough fiber in your diet is good for general digestive and bowel health. I diligently took Metamucil for six weeks. While there might have been some slight improvement, it really was not effective enough.
It occurred to me that perhaps a different sort of fiber might work better for me. Metamucil is psyllium husk but there are other fiber supplements. As I was browsing in the drugstore I found another fiber supplement that was made from guar gum and was advertised to be
Low FODMAP and CERTIFIED for IBS
I grabbed it off the shelf with great hope that this really sounded perfect for me. However it turned out to be a disaster. After 4 days my diarrhea had become worse than ever and I had to discontinue that supplement.
With this lack of success from common sense and my own devices, I turned to modern medicine. The first advice I got from my doctor was to try a stricter diet. He suggested lactose-free, gluten-free, and FODMAP. I tried them all. None led to any big improvement and I could not see any pattern between any particular food and the IBS symptoms.
My next step was a referral to a gastroenterologist. The first thing he wanted to do was a colonoscopy. I wasn’t quite due for another one according to the standard 5 year schedule but I succumbed to the annoying procedure in the hopes of reaching a diagnosis. Fortunately I had a very clean colon, but unfortunately there was no diagnosis. Some gastrointestinal conditions have physical symptoms which can be seen such as diseases like colorectal cancer, colitis, celiac disease or diverticulitis. If a gastroenterologist can’t see anything physical, your condition will generally just be lumped into the category IBS, a catch all to cover everything that modern medicine doesn’t understand yet. The GI guy didn’t suggest any medication or treatment.
So it was back to the drawing board. The Internet has a lot of information but sometimes it’s not easy to find the right information that’s going to help you. Eventually I came across IBS Tales, a website with a wealth of information. It was created by a woman who had IBS for over 20 years and had explored and documented many of its different aspects. One section of the website contained stories from people who have IBS. A lot of these were interesting but it wasn’t easy to draw conclusions from individual cases that would apply to me. The website had recommendations for a number of books. I bought this one, but in the end it did not help me very much. The First Year: IBS: An Essential Guide for the Newly Diagnosed
The most interesting part of the website for me was the section on Treatment Reviews. In particular there was a subsection for IBS Medications. It had a long list of antispasmodic drugs. It is thought that one cause of IBS is abnormal “motility” in the digestive system. Normally the intestines rhythmically contract and then relax to move food through the intestines. Contractions that are stronger and last longer than usual can cause gas, bloating and diarrhea. Contractions that are weak can slow the passage of food and lead to constipation. Antispasmodic drugs slow the motility of the GI tract by relaxing the muscles in the stomach and intestines.
On a hunch, I decided to try and see if the FDA had approved any drugs for IBS. I soon hit paydirt. I was astounded to discover that there were not one, not two, not three, but four FDA approved drugs for IBS; two for IBS-C (constipation) and two for IBS-D (diarrhea). In my consultations with several doctors, this option had never been mentioned.
After some more digging I hit a gold mine. I found an article in the American Journal of Gastroenterology titled Clinical Guideline: Management of Irritable Bowel Syndrome. It was a review of studies of IBS treatments and provided a list of not only what was recommended but what not was not recommended.
Armed with my new medical knowledge, I made an appointment with the gastroenterologist for a follow up of my case.
In the meeting, I summarized the various things I had tried since my colonoscopy, all without real improvement. Then I asked him about using an antispasmodic drug. He said No he didn’t prescribe them, they were addictive. I had not come across this in anything I had read so I asked “There are quite a lot of antispasmodic drugs, are they all addictive?”
He didn’t answer. Instead he said “Are you going to read things on the Internet and do your own research or did you come here for my medical advice?”
I backed off and said No I would like to know what he recommended. He said I should use Metamucil. I replied that I had tried Metamucil and it really didn’t work for me. Then he asked if I used the flavored Metamucil. I said “Yes, I used the orange flavored one.” He said, “That’s your problem. The added sugar prevents Metamucil from working properly. I have a lot of patients using plain Metamucil and they’re all doing well.”
So I said (dubiously) “Thank you. I will try that.”
At home I checked my Metamucil jar that was still on the shelf. Even though it was orange flavored, it was sugarless. So I don’t know what that sugar theory was. But if this doctor had so many IBS patients doing well with Metamucil, I decided I should give it another try. However to no avail. After six weeks I still saw no improvement.
He did give me one piece of useful advice. He suggested that before going on an outing, if my stomach was unsettled I could use Imodium as a preventative. I had relied on Imodium many times when diarrhea had become severe and it worked very well, but it was not recommended for use on a regular basis. However, using a lower dose of Imodium occasionally as a preventative measure slows the motility of the intestinal tract and it did prove to be helpful, but overuse could lead to constipation.
Then a curious thing happened. I got a cold that lodged in my chest. After seven weeks I got an antibiotic. Five days of levofloxacin cleared up my respiratory infection and it also cleared up my IBS cramps and diarrhea. It must be that the antibiotic had killed certain intestinal bacteria that had been interfering with my digestive system.
This was a wonderful turn of events and I enjoyed it for about four months. But then my IBS symptoms gradually came back.
I had pretty well tried all the non pharmacological treatments in the Journal of Gastroenterology IBS guidelines. I felt that the best way forward was to try one of the prescription drugs that was recommended for IBS. Going back to the gastroenterologist surely was a dead end, so I booked an appointment with my family doctor. I extracted the following summary of the pharmacological treatments from the Journal paper to bring in to review with him. He actually hadn’t seen the paper which had been published in 2021 or a very similar paper that had been published in 2019 by the Canadian Association of Gastroenterology.
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1. We recommend against the use of antispasmodics currently available in the United States to treat IBS symptoms. Conditional recommendation; low quality of evidence.
2. We recommend that TCAs (tricyclic antidepressants – amitriptyline, nortriptyline, imipramine, desipramine) be used to treat symptoms of IBS. Strong recommendation; moderate quality of evidence. 57% improvement vs 36% placebo.
3. We recommend the use of rifaximin (FDA approved) to treat IBS-D symptoms. Strong recommendation; moderate level of evidence. Most favorable safety profile. 41% improvement vs 32% placebo but relapses; 64% respond to retreatment.
4. We suggest that mixed opioid agonists/antagonists (eluxadoline FDA approved) be used to treat IBS-D symptoms. Conditional recommendation; moderate quality of evidence.27% improvement vs 17% placebo.
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He thought that treatment 2 would be the best. It had the highest response rate in trials; 57 % of patients had improved and he was familiar with the antidepressants drugs which he prescribed for a lot of patients with depression.
I said I thought recommendation 3 might be a better option for me. It had a lower success rate in trials, only 41%, but I said that I was pretty sure that it would work for me, because this drug was actually an antibiotic and I had just had success with an antibiotic. In addition the treatment was only two weeks. I would not have to take it every day and it had the lowest risk of side effects of all the recommendations.
So that’s what we did. He wrote out a prescription for rifaximin. After the 14 day course of this antibiotic, my IBS symptoms improved immensely. After almost two years, I could lead a more normal life.
This is not a story that ends by saying “And he lived happily ever after.” People on rifaximin tend to relapse. At that point I will have to decide whether to use it again or try one of the other treatments. At this time IBS cannot be considered an illness that can be cured by a treatment. But there are a lot of options that can make it more manageable.
What is there to learn from this convoluted path of discovery?
First of all, no one treatment works for everybody. Even the FDA approved drugs didn’t work for most people; they worked for less than 50%. In the case of rifaximin, the clinical trial did not show a huge improvement over the placebo group, only 41% versus 32%. However this was enough to be statistically significant and receive FDA approval.
What this means is that most things that you try will probably not work. You have to keep trying more options until hopefully you find a treatment that works for you. In spite of the many advances in modern medicine, a lot of medicine is really just trial and error, and it can be quite a lot of error.
The second thing to learn is how important it can be to do your own research. It was only after I found the Journal of Gastroenterology IBS guidelines which provided me with the direction to push for a treatment that ended up working for me.
And finally, it’s important to find a doctor that you can collaborate with so that you collectively arrive at good medical decisions.
I started this blog in March 2020 because there was a lack of information being provided about what was happening during the Covid pandemic. There were a lot of questions that weren’t being asked and a lot that weren’t being answered and I attempted to provide some information.
Today a major crisis exists in the Middle East. There are a lot of questions that aren’t being answered and many that aren’t even being asked.
The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has always tried to warn civilians about areas they are targeting so that they can move to safety and avoid getting injured or killed from the fallout when bombs are dropped. It has been reported repeatedly that people in Gaza have nowhere to go.
What about Egypt?
The western border of Gaza is with Egypt. Directly west of that border is the Sinai desert, largely uninhabited land, an area larger than Gaza itself. This could easily provide a safe refuge for as many people from Gaza who wanted to leave their homes. But Egypt is not providing this refuge.
A constant refrain from Pro-Palestinians is that Israel has oppressed the people in Gaza with a blockade. But Egypt has also blocked its border with Gaza.
Why do people critical of Israel’s blockade of Gaza never mention Egypt? Why does Egypt maintain a blockade and not do anything to support their Palestinian Brothers?
A criticism of Israel that has been mounting in recent years is that it is an “apartheid state” likening its oppression of Palestinians to the oppression of blacks in South Africa. This criticism is voiced by Palestinians, human rights organizations like Amnesty International, the new left and Israeli organizations like Yesh Din, in spite of the fact that Palestinians in Israel are citizens with voting rights and there is an Arab party in the Knesset that was actually part of the coalition government in Israel in 2021. Arabs in Israel hold positions in the courts, universities, hospitals and every walk of society.
About 2 million Palestinians are Israeli citizens. About 3 million Palestinians live in refugee camps in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. The Palestinians who live in these camps do not have basic human rights. They do not have medical care and only limited access to education and jobs. The physical conditions of the refugee camps are really squalid. It is not unusual for children to be electrocuted from the dangling electrical wires that are strung between buildings. You can find many videos documenting their conditions of extreme poverty on Youtube. This one is by Al Jazeera. Palestinian Refugee Camp
Why do these Arab countries turn their backs on the Palestinians whom they say they support? If Israel is an apartheid state, what does that make Syria, Lebanon and Jordan? Why don’t all the groups that criticize Israel for its treatment of Palestinians criticize any of the Arab countries?
A big criticism of Israel has been its policy of enabling Jewish settlements in the occupied lands of the West Bank. This has been done contrary to most interpretations of international law and has been condemned by all the Arab countries, most European countries and the United States. Opinion polls within Israel show that it generally is not supported by a majority of Israelis.
Why does the Israeli government continue with its policy of allowing settlements in the occupied lands?
Part of the answer to this seems to be the undue influence of the religious parties in Israeli politics. In Benjamin Netanyahu’s 16 years as Prime Minister he has always had to put together a coalition made up of several minority parties in order to get enough seats to form a government. The balance of power has often been held by the small religious Israeli parties that typically get a total of about 20% of the total electoral votes. In return for their support Netanyahu promised to allow expansion of settlements.
But there is another question here.
Does the Israeli political system lead to unstable and undemocratic governments that make decisions only supported by a minority of the population?
Members of the Knesset are elected by proportional representation – the number of seats a party receives is proportional to the number of votes it receives. No party has ever won a majority, so all governments in the history of Israel have been coalitions. In the Knesset today there are 10 different political parties. The coalition government is made up of 7 parties, and 3 of them are religious parties. There have been 37 governments in Israel since 1948. In Canada over the same period there have been 23.
People in Canada should take this as a warning. British Columbia and Prince Edward Island held referendums to change their voting to proportional representation (neither one passed) and there has been a push for it at the federal level. While proportional representation might seem to be a very democratic system on paper, over time small parties are formed to take advantage of the system. When a parliament is splintered into many different political parties, some of the small parties may hold the balance of power and exert undue influence over government policy. In addition, a strong and stable government that results when a party wins a majority of seats in the legislature is difficult to achieve.
Most people have heard about chatGPT but not that many have heard about AlphaFold. But it is AlphaFold that is the most significant achievement of artificial intelligence (AI) by far that I have seen, and I have been following AI for more than 50 years.
AlphaFold is considered by many to have solved the protein folding problem, or at least to have made very significant advances. How strings of amino acids fold to produce stable proteins has been an important question in biology for over 50 years.
In September 2023, the Lasker Foundation announced that the winners of the Basic Medical Research Award were Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for the invention of Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold. In the past 20 years, 32 Lasker winners have received a Nobel prize. So an AI is in line for a Nobel for the first time.
Watch this video for an exciting mini-documentary look behind the scenes of how the team at DeepMind raced to get results to submit to the CASP competition. AlphaFold: The making of a scientific breakthrough
This article shows how AlphaFold is being used in several different research projects. Case Studies Using AlphaFold
DeepMind published the method that AlphaFold uses, put the code in an open source repository and set up a database of 200 million structure predictions, amounting to nearly all the known human proteins.The program and the database have been shared with the scientific community and more than 300,000 investigators have used these resources. The catalog has been expanded to almost every known protein in organisms whose genomes have been sequenced, including viruses that pose epidemic threats and the World Health Organization’s high-priority pathogens. Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold
In only two years, the impact of DeepMind’s published manuscript has vaulted over almost all of the 100,000 research articles that have been published in Nature since 1900. It ranks 50th, having been cited in more than 7000 papers from top journals. Lasker Foundation
You can run AlphaFold on your own computer. Using Google Colaboratory, a cloud based service, you don’t need to have a very powerful machine yourself. Here’s an example of a researcher running AlphaFold to analyze a protein. How to predict a large protein structure with AlphaFold
In August, the respected and influential British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a series of articles investigating the Covid-19 response in Canada. Contrary to the impression of many Canadians that Canada handled the Covid pandemic well, especially as compared to the United States and the UK, the BMJ had a long list of skathing criticisms, and stated in several places that a national enquiry is needed to make sure that important lessons are learned for the future.
“The picture that emerges is an ill prepared country with outdated data systems, poor coordination and cohesion and blindness about its citizens’ diverse needs. What saved Canada was a largely willing and conforming populace that withstood stringent public health measures and achieved among the world’s highest levels of vaccination coverage. In other words, Canadians delivered on the pandemic response while its governments faltered.” … The Guardian
“The willingness of Canadians to comply with vaccination requirements and harsh public health restrictions did more to bring Covid-19 under control than the fragmented, deficient and unsavvy response of governments … Canada leads wealthy nations for Covid related fatalities in care homes, despite more than 100 reports and inquiries over 50 years that foreshadowed a nursing home crisis … More long-term care home outbreaks occurred in 2022 than 2020 and 2021 combined.” … National Post
During the pandemic, many articles in this blog were pretty critical of the decisions and actions taken, and the actions not taken, from public health officials to politicians. The vaccine rollout was particularly chaotic. People scrambled to find out where they could get a vaccination and in the beginning a lot depended on word of mouth. It took Ontario three months to provide a vaccine reservation system, but for weeks it was overloaded and crashed, making it difficult for people to book a shot. In the meantime Doug Ford blamed Justin Trudeau for not delivering enough vaccines. The botched vaccine rollout was a classic case of a series of bad management decisions. The effect was that vaccine distribution was inequitable for many and stressful for everybody.
Bad Management 1. No planning for a vaccine rollout
By May 2020 it was clear that the results of the phase 3 clinical trials for the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines would be submitted to the FDA by December 2020 and that with fast track approval, vaccines would be ready to ship in January 2021.
Neither the federal nor provincial governments began any serious planning until vaccine deliveries were confirmed in December.
Here is a revealing interview that makes this clear. One week before the first batch of vaccines were due to be delivered, the CEO of UHN, which was the first vaccine distribution center for Toronto, had only a few vague answers but no answers for a lot of key questions that should have been planned many months before. “How will we make this logistically work?” “Healthcare workers have been really busy, do we have the right people?” “We have not been told anything about the next batches of vaccines.”
Bad Management 2. Poor selection of leaders
The Trump administration appointed F. Perna, a four-star general and a logistics expert, as the chief operating officer of “Operation Warp Speed”. The thinking was that the major challenge of the vaccine rollout was the logistics to move vaccines from suppliers to vaccine centers and that military people had the experience with these kinds of logistics. Canada followed suit as did Ontario.
At the end of November, about one week before vaccines were due to arrive in Canada, Trudeau appointed Major-General Dany Fortin, a former NATO commander in Iraq, to head up the Federal vaccinations task force. A short time later, Doug Ford appointed former head of the Canadian Armed Forces, General Rick Hillier, to lead a new task force to oversee the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccines in Ontario.
What shallow thinking. Using large military aircraft to move military equipment and thousands of troops across the globe is a logistics problem that is quite different from shipping boxes of vaccines from a handful of suppliers to a few vaccination centers across the country. The “logistics” of shipping vaccines from suppliers to vaccination centers is the easiest part of the overall vaccination distribution. The challenging part is how to get the vaccines from vaccination centers into the arms of millions of people. Who was going to administer the shots? Nurses were overloaded with Covid cases in the hospitals. Would additional people be recruited? Who would train them? How would people get their vaccinations? Would they line up for hours in ad hoc locations such as community centers or would modern technology be used so that people could reserve in advance at a time and location of their choosing? What about the many people who couldn’t use the Internet? Would there be enough phone lines and people to answer the phones to provide information and help people book a reservation?
The high rank military generals had many years of experience in the military but no significant experience working in civilian life. The values and orientations of the military focussing on preparing for battle or securing defensive positions is quite different. This was clearly born out when General Hillier suspended the vaccination program in Ontario in December 2020 so that people could enjoy their holiday season. He clearly did not understand the urgency that civilians wanted to proceed with vaccinations as quickly as possible. A pause in vaccinations was as absurd as firefighters leaving a five alarm blaze for a lunch break. The public outroar was furious and Hillier had to walk it back quickly, issuing an apology and promising not to take off any more days in the vaccine rollout. Hillier resigned three months later. He was replaced by someone with a medical background, Homer Chin-nan Tien, the president of the air ambulance service Ornge.
In spite of the grandiose statements about the expertise of the Canadian military, there seems to be only one case of military planes being used, to deliver 5 freezers for Canada’s North.
On the other hand there were many interviews and photo ops with the Minister of Procurement Anita Anand on the tarmac meeting large cargo planes arriving with vaccines. They were always FedEx planes.
Lessons Learned?
“Lessons from the outbreak of SARS-CoV-1 in 2003 which impacted Canada more than any other country outside of Asia went unheeded and left the country’s governments and health authorities ill prepared for Covid-19. An independent, national inquiry is needed to review Canada’s Covid-19 response, draw lessons, and ensure accountability for the past and future pandemic preparedness.” … British Medical Journal
There is no commitment or announcement from the Canadian government to undertake such an inquiry.
Is Canada going to learn from the lessons of history, or is Canada doomed to repeat history, again?
The Internet was made “safe” for E-commerce back in 1995 when Netscape developed encryption for web traffic. However many people did not trust providing their credit card information for Internet purchases. But when the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns began in 2020, many more people started to make purchases over the Internet for such basic things as grocery delivery and take out food. Using credit card information on the Internet is fairly safe but there are a number of risks.
Almost all websites use a secure (encrypted) connection, denoted by https instead of http in the address line of a browser, often shown with a lock icon
This means that all the information being sent to the website is encrypted, including your credit card information.
Breaking encryption is well beyond the capability of any hacker who is intent on stealing your credit card information as it travels over the Internet. However, the NSA (U.S. National Security Agency) is able to break encryption. But this is only after years of spending more than a billion dollars developing widespread network surveillance, large data bases, specialized supercomputers and collaboration with large American technology companies to siphon off Internet traffic (as revealed in documents released by Edward Snowden). How US and UK spy agencies defeat internet security
A bigger risk is if you happen to have malware on your computer that monitors everything you type. This type of malware, called “spyware”, will record credit card information and send it back to a hacker’s computer. The protection for this is to make sure that you have antivirus software running on your computer that includes anti-spyware. If your antivirus does not include anti-spyware, you can add a separate anti-spyware package.
Another risk is your credit card information being stolen from the website long after you have made a purchase. Most websites store your credit card information. This makes it more convenient for you if you order from them again. But there have been many security breaches in which hackers have broken into the servers of some very large companies and stolen millions of credit cards. Biggest credit card data breaches
This risk is something that you may be able to minimize. In Europe privacy laws make it illegal for websites to store credit card information without your express consent. But in North America, privacy laws are way behind and there is no such protection. Websites should really ask you if you want to save your information, but most of them do not. And they don’t provide an option for you to remove your credit card information from their servers.
However, if you use PayPal instead of a credit card, you have more control over websites retaining your payment information. You can go into your PayPal account and look at all the websites that have “Automatic Payment” turned on and turn them off. In general you want to do that for all websites except those in which you have set up a monthly regular payment, such as Netflix which is a monthly subscription service, or services you use regularly such as Uber. When I went through my PayPal account, I found three Automatic Payments to TicketKing going back several years.
PayPal also provides more security for your payment credentials. When you use PayPal to make a purchase on a website, you are directed to PayPal to log into your account. The webserver does not see your password and so it cannot save it. If a hacker breaks into a webserver and steals PayPal account information, it cannot be used to make purchases or access your PayPal account. However there is one caveat here, which is that a hacker may try to break into your PayPal account by guessing your password. As long as you guard your PayPal login information carefully you will be pretty safe.
Not many PayPal data breaches have been reported compared to credit card breaches but one was reported in 2022. Only personal information was stolen and there was no indication of any financial losses. PayPal breach
In summary, what can you do to minimize your Internet payment information being compromised?
1. Make sure you have anti-spyware software protecting your computer (it may be part of your antivirus software).
2. Use PayPal whenever possible for online payments instead of credit cards. After completing the transaction, go into your PayPal account and turn off Automatic Payment for that website, unless it is a bona fide subscription service.
