If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
One way to think about AI's unwelcome intrusion into our lives can be summed up with Goodhardt's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
Goodhart's Law is a harsh mistress. It's incredibly exciting to discover a new way of measuring aspects of a complex system in a way that lets you understand (and thus control) it. In 1998, Sergey Brin and Larry Page realized that all the links created by everyone who'd ever made a webpage represented a kind of latent map of the value and authority of every website. We could infer that pages that had more links pointing to them were considered more noteworthy than pages that had fewer inbound links. Moreover, we could treat those heavily linked-to pages as authoritative and infer that when they linked to another page, it, too, was likely to be important.
This insight, called "PageRank," was behind Google's stunning entry into the search market, which was easily one of the most exciting technological developments of the decade, as the entire web just snapped into place as a useful system for retrieving information that had been created by a vast, uncoordinated army of web-writers, hosted in a distributed system without any central controls.
Then came the revenge of Goodhart's Law. Before Google became the dominant mechanism for locating webpages, the only reason for anyone to link to a given page or site was because there was something there they thought you should see. Google aggregated all those "I think you should see this" signals and turned them into a map of the web's relevance and authority.
But making a link to a webpage is easy. Once there was another reason to make a link between two web-pages – to garner traffic, which could be converted into money and/or influence – then bad actors made a lot of spurious links between websites. They created linkfarms, they spammed blog comments, they hacked websites for the sole purpose of adding a bunch of human-invisible, Google-scraper-readable links to pages.
The metric ("how many links are there to this page?") became a target ("make links to this page") and ceased to be a useful metric.
Goodhart's Law is still a plague on Google search quality. "Reputation abuse" is a webcrime committed by venerable sites like Forbes, Fortune and Better Homes and Gardens, who abuse the authority imparted by tons of inbound links accumulated over decades by creating spammy, fake product-review sites stuffed with affiliate links, that Google ranks more highly than real, rigorous review sites because of all that accumulated googlejuice:
Goodhart's Law is 50 years old, but policymakers are woefully ignorant of it and continue to operate as though it doesn't apply to them. This is especially pronounced when policymakers are determined to Do Something about a public service that has been starved of funding kicked around as a political football to the point where it has degraded and started to outrage the public. When this happens, policymakers are apt to blame public servants – rather than themselves – for this degradation, and then set out to Bring Accountability to those public employees.
The NHS did this with ambulance response times, which are very bad, and that fact is, in turn, very bad. The reason ambulance response times suck isn't hard to winkle out: there's not enough money being spent on ambulances, drivers, and medics. But that's not a politically popular conclusion, especially in the UK, which has been under brutal and worsening austerity since the Blair years (don't worry, eventually they'll do enough austerity and things will really turn around, because, as the old saying goes, "Good policymaking consists of doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome)."
Instead of blaming inadequate funding for poor ambulance response times, politicians blamed "inefficiency," driven by a poor motivation. So they established a metric: ambulances must arrive within a certain number of minutes (and they set a consequence: massive cuts to any ambulance service that didn't meet the metric).
Now, "an ambulance where it's needed within a set amount of time" may sound like a straightforward metric, and it was – retrospectively. As in, we could tell that the ambulance service was in trouble because ambulances were taking half an hour or more to arrive. But prospectively, after that metric became a target, it immediately ceased to be a good metric. That's because ambulance services, faced with the impossible task of improving response times without spending money, started to dispatch ambulance motorbikes that couldn't carry 95% of the stuff needed to respond to a medical emergency, and had no way to get patients back to hospitals. These motorbikes were able to meet the response-time targets…without improving the survival rates of people who summoned ambulances:
AI turns out to be a great way to explore all the perverse dimensions of Goodhart's Law. For years, machine learning specialists have struggled with the problem of "reward hacking," in which an AI figures out how to meet some target in a way that blows up the metric it was derived from:
My favorite example of this is the AI-powered Roomba that was programmed to find an efficient path that minimized collisions with furniture, as measured by a forward-facing sensor that sent a signal whenever the Roomba bumped into anything. The Roomba started driving backwards, smashing into all kinds of furniture, but measuring zero collisions, because there was no collision-sensor on its back:
Charlie Stross has observed that corporations are a kind of "slow AI," that engage in endless reward-hacking to accomplish their goals, increasing their profits by finding nominally legal ways to poison the air, cheat their customers and maim their workers:
Public services under conditions of austerity are another kind of slow AI. When policymakers demand that a metric be satisfied without delivering any of the budget or resources needed to satisfy it, the public employees downstream of that impossible demand will start reward-hacking and the metric will become a target, and then cease to be a useful metric.
Which brings me, at last, to AI in educational contexts.
In 2008, George W Bush stepped up the long-running war on education with the No Child Left Behind Act. The right hates public education, for many reasons. Obviously, there's the fact that uneducated people are easier to mislead, which is helpful if you want to get a bunch of turkeys to vote for Christmas ("I love the uneducated" -DJ Trump). Then there's the fact that, since 1954's Brown v Board of Ed, Black and brown kids were legally guaranteed the right to be educated alongside white kids, which makes a large swathe of the right absolutely nuts. Then there was the 1962 Supreme Court decisions that banned prayer in school, leading to bans on teaching Christian doctrine, including nonsense like Young Earth Creationism. Finally, there's the fact that teachers a) belong to unions; and, b) believe in their jobs and fight for the kids they teach.
No Child Left Behind was a vicious salvo in the war on teachers, positing the problem with education as a failure of teachers, driven by a combination of poor training and indifference to their students. Under No Child Left Behind, students were subjected to multiple rounds of standardized tests, and teachers with low-performing students had their budgets taken away (after first being offered modest assistance in improving those scores).
Some of NCLB's standardized tests represented reasonable metrics: we really do want kids to be able to read and do math and reason and string together coherent thoughts at various points in their schooling. But when these metrics became targets, boy did they stop being useful as metrics.
It's impossible to overstate how fucking perverse NCLB was. I once met an elementary school teacher from an incredibly poor school district in Kansas. Many of her students were resettled refugees who didn't speak English; they spoke a language that no one in the school system could speak, and which had no system of writing. They arrived in her classroom unable to speak English and unable to read or write in any language, and no one could speak their language.
Obviously, these students performed badly on standardized tests delivered in English (it didn't help that they had to take the tests just months after arriving in the classroom, because the clock started ticking on their first test when they entered the system, which could take half a year to place them in a class). Within a couple years, these schools had had most of their budgets taken away.
When the standardized tests rolled around, this teacher would lead her students into the only room in the school with computers – the test taking room. For many of these students, this was the first time they had ever used a computer. She would tell them to do their best and leave the room for an hour, while a well-paid proctor (along with test-taking computers, the only thing NCLB guaranteed funding for) observed them as they tried to figure out how a mouse worked. They would all score zero on the test, and the school would be punished.
NCLB was such a failure that it was eventually rescinded (in 2015), but by that time, a new system of standardization had rushed in to fill the gap, the Common Core. Common Core is a set of rigid standardized curriciula – with standardized assessment rubrics – that was, once again, driven by contempt for teachers. The argument for Common Core was that students were failing – not because of falling budgets or No Child Left Behind – but because the unions were "protecting bad teachers," who would then go on to fail students. By taking away discretion from teachers, we could impose "accountability" on them.
The absolutely predictable outcome followed Goodhart's Law to a tee: teachers prioritized inculcating students with the skills to pass the standardized tests, and when those test-taking skills crowded out actual learning, learning fell by the wayside.
This continues up to the most advanced part of public education, the Advanced Placement courses that students aspiring to college are strongly pressured to take. If Common Core is rigid, AP is brittle to the point of shattering. Anyone who's ever parented a kid through the US secondary school system knows how much time their kids spent learning to hit their marks on standardized assessments, to the exclusion of actual learning, and how soul-suckingly awful this is.
Take that staple of the AP assessment rubric: the five-paragraph essay (5PE), bane of students, teachers and parents everywhere:
Speaking as a sometime writing teacher and an internationally bestselling essayist, 5PEs are objectively very bad essays. Their only virtue is that they can be assessed in a totally standard way, so the grade any given 5PE is awarded by any grader is likely to be the same grade it receives when presented to any other grader. Grading an essay is an irreducibly subjective matter, and the only way to create an objective standard for essays is to make the essays unrecognizable as essays.
And yet, the 5PE is the heart of assessment for many AP classes, from History to English to Social Studies and beyond. A kid who scores high on any humanities APs will have put endless hours into perfecting this perfectly abominable literary form, mastering a skill that they will never, ever be called upon to use (the top piece of college entrance advice is "don't write your personal essay as a 5PE" and college professors spend the first half of their 101 classes teaching students not to turn in 5PEs).
The same goes for many other aspects of AP and Common Core assessment. If you do AP Lit, you'll be required to annotate the literature you read by making a set number of marginal observations on every page of the novels, poems and essays you read. Again, as a literary reviewer, novelist, and nonfiction writer who's written more than 30 books, I have to say, this is a batshit way to learn to analyze and criticize literature. Its sole virtue is that it reduces the qualitative matter of literary analysis to a quantitative target that students can hit and teachers can count.
And that's where AI comes in. AI – the ultimate bullshit machine – can produce a better 5PE than any student can, because the point of the 5PE isn't to be intellectually curious or rigorous, it's to produce a standardized output that can be analyzed using a standardized rubric.
I've been writing YA novels and doing school visits for long enough to cement my understanding that kids are actually pretty darned clever. They don't graduate from high school thinking that their mastery of the 5PE is in any way good or useful, or that they're learning about literature by making five marginal observations per page when they read a book.
Given all this, why wouldn't you ask an AI to do your homework? That homework is already the revenge of Goodhart's Law, a target that has ruined its metric. Your homework performance says nothing useful about your mastery of the subject, so why not let the AI write it. Hell, if you're a smart, motivated kid, then letting the AI write your bullshit 5PEs might give you time to write something good.
Teachers aren't to blame here. They have to teach to the test, or they will fail their students (literally, because they will have to assign a failing grade to them, and figuratively, because a student who gets a failing grade will face all kinds of punishments). Teachers' unions – who consistently fight against standardization and in favor of their members discretion to practice their educational skills based on kids' individual needs – are the best hope we have:
The right hates teachers and keeps on setting them up to fail. That hatred has no bottom. Take the Republican Texas State Rep Ryan Guillen, whose House Bill 462 will increase the state's school safety budget from $10/student to $100/student, with those additional funds earmarked to buy one armed drone per 200 students (these drones are supplied by a single company that has ties to Guillen):
Imagine how much Texas schools could do with an extra $90/student/year – how much more usefully that money could be spent if it were turned over to teachers. But instead, Rep Guillen wants to put "AI in schools" in the form of drones equipped with pepper-spray, flash bangs, and "lances" that can be smashed into people at 100mph.
The problem with AI in schools isn't that students are using AI to do their homework. It's that schools have been turned into reward-hacking AIs by a system that hates the idea of an educated populace almost as much as it hates the idea of unionized teachers who are empowered to teach our kids.
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There are only four more days left in my Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.
Rooftop solar is the future, but it's also a scam. It didn't have to be, but America decided that the best way to roll out distributed, resilient, clean and renewable energy was to let Wall Street run the show. They turned it into a scam, and now it's in terrible trouble. which means we are in terrible trouble.
There's a (superficial) good case for turning markets loose on the problem of financing the rollout of an entirely new kind of energy provision across a large and heterogeneous nation. As capitalism's champions (and apologists) have observed since the days of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, markets harness together the work of thousands or even millions of strangers in pursuit of a common goal, without all those people having to agree on a single approach or plan of action. Merely dangle the incentive of profit before the market's teeming participants and they will align themselves towards it, like iron filings all snapping into formation towards a magnet.
But markets have a problem: they are prone to "reward hacking." This is a term from AI research: tell your AI that you want it to do something, and it will find the fastest and most efficient way of doing it, even if that method is one that actually destroys the reason you were pursuing the goal in the first place.
For example: if you use an AI to come up with a Roomba that doesn't bang into furniture, you might tell that Roomba to avoid collisions. However, the Roomba is only designed to register collisions with its front-facing sensor. Turn the Roomba loose and it will quickly hit on the tactic of racing around the room in reverse, banging into all your furniture repeatedly, while never registering a single collision:
This is sometimes called the "alignment problem." High-speed, probabilistic systems that can't be fully predicted in advance can very quickly run off the rails. It's an idea that pre-dates AI, of course – think of the Sorcerer's Apprentice. But AI produces these perverse outcomes at scale…and so does capitalism.
Many sf writers have observed the odd phenomenon of corporate AI executives spinning bad sci-fi scenarios about their AIs inadvertently destroying the human race by spinning off in some kind of paperclip-maximizing reward-hack that reduces the whole planet to grey goo in order to make more paperclips. This idea is very implausible (to say the least), but the fact that so many corporate leaders are obsessed with autonomous systems reward-hacking their way into catastrophe tells us something about corporate executives, even if it has no predictive value for understanding the future of technology.
Both Ted Chiang and Charlie Stross have theorized that the source of these anxieties isn't AI – it's corporations. Corporations are these equilibrium-seeking complex machines that can't be programmed, only prompted. CEOs know that they don't actually run their companies, and it haunts them, because while they can decompose a company into all its constituent elements – capital, labor, procedures – they can't get this model-train set to go around the loop:
Stross calls corporations "Slow AI," a pernicious artificial life-form that acts like a pedantic genie, always on the hunt for ways to destroy you while still strictly following your directions. Markets are an extremely reliable way to find the most awful alignment problems – but by the time they've surfaced them, they've also destroyed the thing you were hoping to improve with your market mechanism.
Which brings me back to solar, as practiced in America. In a long Time feature, Alana Semuels describes the waves of bankruptcies, revealed frauds, and even confiscation of homeowners' houses arising from a decade of financialized solar:
The problem starts with a pretty common finance puzzle: solar pays off big over its lifespan, saving the homeowner money and insulating them from price-shocks, emergency power outages, and other horrors. But solar requires a large upfront investment, which many homeowners can't afford to make. To resolve this, the finance industry extends credit to homeowners (lets them borrow money) and gets paid back out of the savings the homeowner realizes over the years to come.
But of course, this requires a lot of capital, and homeowners still might not see the wisdom of paying even some of the price of solar and taking on debt for a benefit they won't even realize until the whole debt is paid off. So the government moved in to tinker with the markets, injecting prompts into the slow AIs to see if it could coax the system into producing a faster solar rollout – say, one that didn't have to rely on waves of deadly power-outages during storms, heatwaves, fires, etc, to convince homeowners to get on board because they'd have experienced the pain of sitting through those disasters in the dark.
The government created subsidies – tax credits, direct cash, and mixes thereof – in the expectation that Wall Street would see all these credits and subsidies that everyday people were entitled to and go on the hunt for them. And they did! Armies of fast-talking sales-reps fanned out across America, ringing dooorbells and sticking fliers in mailboxes, and lying like hell about how your new solar roof was gonna work out for you.
These hustlers tricked old and vulnerable people into signing up for arrangements that saw them saddled with ballooning debt payments (after a honeymoon period at a super-low teaser rate), backstopped by liens on their houses, which meant that missing a payment could mean losing your home. They underprovisioned the solar that they installed, leaving homeowners with sky-high electrical bills on top of those debt payments.
If this sounds familiar, it's because it shares a lot of DNA with the subprime housing bubble, where fast-talking salesmen conned vulnerable people into taking out predatory mortgages with sky-high rates that kicked in after a honeymoon period, promising buyers that the rising value of housing would offset any losses from that high rate.
These fraudsters knew they were acquiring toxic assets, but it didn't matter, because they were bundling up those assets into "collateralized debt obligations" – exotic black-box "derivatives" that could be sold onto pension funds, retail investors, and other suckers.
This is likewise true of solar, where the tax-credits, subsidies and other income streams that these new solar installations offgassed were captured and turned into bonds that were sold into the financial markets, producing an insatiable demand for more rooftop solar installations, and that meant lots more fraud.
Which brings us to today, where homeowners across America are waking up to discover that their power bills have gone up thanks to their solar arrays, even as the giant, financialized solar firms that supplied them are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, thanks to waves of defaults. Meanwhile, all those bonds that were created from solar installations are ticking timebombs, sitting on institutions' balance-sheets, waiting to go blooie once the defaults cross some unpredictable threshold.
Markets are very efficient at mobilizing capital for growth opportunities. America has a lot of rooftop solar. But 70% of that solar isn't owned by the homeowner – it's owned by a solar company, which is to say, "a finance company that happens to sell solar":
And markets are very efficient at reward hacking. The point of any market is to multiply capital. If the only way to multiply the capital is through building solar, then you get solar. But the finance sector specializes in making the capital multiply as much as possible while doing as little as possible on the solar front. Huge chunks of those federal subsidies were gobbled up by junk-fees and other financial tricks – sometimes more than 100%.
The solar companies would be in even worse trouble, but they also tricked all their victims into signing binding arbitration waivers that deny them the power to sue and force them to have their grievances heard by fake judges who are paid by the solar companies to decide whether the solar companies have done anything wrong. You will not be surprised to learn that the arbitrators are reluctant to find against their paymasters.
I had a sense that all this was going on even before I read Semuels' excellent article. We bought a solar installation from Treeium, a highly rated, giant Southern California solar installer. We got an incredibly hard sell from them to get our solar "for free" – that is, through these financial arrangements – but I'd just sold a book and I had cash on hand and I was adamant that we were just going to pay upfront. As soon as that was clear, Treeium's ardor palpably cooled. We ended up with a grossly defective, unsafe and underpowered solar installation that has cost more than $10,000 to bring into a functional state (using another vendor). I briefly considered suing Treeium (I had insisted on striking the binding arbitration waiver from the contract) but in the end, I decided life was too short.
The thing is, solar is amazing. We love running our house on sunshine. But markets have proven – again and again – to be an unreliable and even dangerous way to improve Americans' homes and make them more resilient. After all, Americans' homes are the largest asset they are apt to own, which makes them irresistible targets for scammers:
That's why the subprime scammers targets Americans' homes in the 2000s, and it's why the house-stealing fraudsters who blanket the country in "We Buy Ugly Homes" are targeting them now. Same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: "That's where the money is":
America can and should electrify and solarize. There are serious logistical challenges related to sourcing the underlying materials and deploying the labor, but those challenges are grossly overrated by people who assume the only way we can approach them is though markets, those monkey's paw curses that always find a way to snatch profitable defeat from the jaws of useful victory.
To get a sense of how the engineering challenges of electrification could be met, read McArthur fellow Saul Griffith's excellent popular engineering text Electrify:
And to really understand the transformative power of solar, don't miss Deb Chachra's How Infrastructure Works, where you'll learn that we could give every person on Earth the energy budget of a Canadian (like an American, but colder) by capturing just 0.4% of the solar rays that reach Earth's surface:
But we won't get there with markets. All markets will do is create incentives to cheat. Think of the market for "carbon offsets," which were supposed to substitute markets for direct regulation, and which produced a fraud-riddled market for lemons that sells indulgences to our worst polluters, who go on destroying our planet and our future:
We can address the climate emergency, but not by prompting the slow AI and hoping it doesn't figure out a way to reward-hack its way to giant profits while doing nothing. Founder and chairman of Goodleap, Hayes Barnard, is one of the 400 richest people in the world – a fortune built on scammers who tricked old people into signing away their homes for nonfunctional solar):
If governments are willing to spend billions incentivizing rooftop solar, they can simply spend billions installing rooftop solar – no Slow AI required.
Berliners: Otherland has added a second date (Jan 28 - TOMORROW!) for my book-talk after the first one sold out - book now!
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
i love this idea that the reason humanity didnt evolve to manipulate the MM field was because instead of using it to rewrite the timeline to give us ourselves great powers we would have used it to makeourselves just happy and satisfied and would die of thrist and hunger without knowing
Building robots that don't harm humans is an incredibly complex challenge. Here are the rules guiding design at Google.
The problem with "rewarding" an AI for work is that, like humans, they might be tempted to cheat. Take our cleaning robot again, who is tasked to straighten up the living room. It might earn a certain number of points for every object it puts in its place, which, in turn, might incentivize the robot to actually start creating messes to clean, say, by putting items away in as destructive a manner as possible. This is extremely common in robots, Google warns, so much so it says this so-called reward hacking may be a "deep and general problem" of AIs.
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