On The Public Order Emergency Commission

Public testimony of the commission initiated in the wake of the February 2022 invocation of the Emergencies Act (EA) has concluded this week.

Frankly, there were few surprises in the course of testimony. Members of the Convoy swore up and down that they were just peaceful protestors, policing agencies demonstrated that they were woefully unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with the situation, the conservative-led provincial governments failed entirely to actively engage until forced, and eventually the Federal Government decided that the overall impact required direct action. 

Perhaps the most interesting little piece of testimony came from the head of CSIS who stated that both that he had advised the government to use the EA, and that the situation did not fulfil the requirements of an emergency under the CSIS Act. I thought that was a particularly interesting, and important, piece of information. It reveals that the legislation we have today is a few years out of date in terms of identifying the potential threats.  

However, while the EA and CSIS legislation share the same wording, we can’t say that the threshold is “the same” in part because the “who” of decision making is quite different. The leadership of CSIS is part of the bureaucracy, and makes decisions based on the legislation that guides it, but there are additional safeguards through the political offices that oversee CSIS.  The Emergencies Act empowers the Governor in Council (Cabinet) to make the decisions, with the subtle little clause in it of “on reasonable grounds”.  

You can quibble over whether or not CSIS thought it met their definition of “Public Order Emergency” or not, but we have to recognize that the decision making of the bureaucracy is not the same as that of the elected politicians, and the authority vested in politicians is much different than that of the bureaucrats.

I also think that the testimony at the commission focused solely on the immediate events of the occupation of Ottawa and the various border blockades to the detriment of understanding root causes. This is reasonable given the mandate of the commission as set out in the EA. 

I think there’s a second level of investigation needed regarding these demonstrations. In particular the unwillingness of Premier Ford to testify is profoundly telling. Just as we have Candice Bergen’s desire to make the convoy “Trudeau’s Problem”,  Ford’s unwillingness to testify, combined with his inaction on the Ambassador Bridge blockade indicates to me that there was more going on at the political level that warrants investigation. I suspect that this will be that much clearer when some of the criminal proceedings start to unfold in court. Nobody wants to be hung with the full responsibility when they are facing prison time. 

I fully expect that when we get to the level of following email trails, text messages, and so on, the picture is going to start unfolding that the Convoy protest itself was nurtured and fed from within conservative political organizing circles. If it was “just” about vaccine mandates or masks, I would not have expected the focused anger directed at Trudeau. 

Yet, the protests themselves were covered with anti-Trudeau slogans. Hating Trudeau is an old sacred cow in conservative circles dating back to the 1980s. In today’s conservative circles, you aren’t even seen as conservative unless you become irrationally a angry about Trudeau.  

The protests likely as not are a case of using propaganda to “whip up a mob”, and the real goal was to undermine the elected government to such a degree that it would make it easy for the opposition to vote against a minority government in the wake of what was obviously going to be Poilievre’s coronation after O’Toole’s ouster. Yes, I know full well that O’Toole was still leader at the time, but it would be naive to think that the knives weren’t already out for him after the election.

Crashing Crypto

The latest crash in the crypto markets has unveiled yet another multi-billion dollar scam, and another overnight billionaire has just taken investors for literally billions in now stranded / lost assets. 

 Now, I’m not writing this as a “see I told you so” piece. I’ve already documented my reasons for being skeptical of cryptocurrency. It’s trivial, almost lazy to write an “I told you so” every time Crypto takes another nosedive. Over the last year, BitCoin has shed 75% of its market price. Any company that sheds 75% of its market value is already at death’s door.  

No, today we’re going to talk about something a little different. There’s a reason Crypto keeps crashing, and it’s really little different than what happened in the lead-up to what came to be known as “Black Thursday”.

Markets have “ups and downs” all the time.  These massive swings are not “ups and downs” - these are the result of “markets” which don’t have meaningful boundaries. The so-called “free market” that capitalism relies on actually exists within the greater context of society, or as Rousseau would have referred to it, “The Social Contract”.

Cryptocurrency, in particular, is alienated from the social contract. Aside from its proponents - who are largely strongly libertarian, and inclined toward some fairly radical interpretations of how the world should work - few people understand cryptocurrencies well enough to even begin to consider how those currencies play in society and what boundaries need to exist on that market. 

Think about it for a minute.  Back in the early days of “Town Markets”, there were boundaries. Merchants would hawk their wares in the town square, and people would buy them after haggling over the price, quality, etc.  Back then, what we would call a scammer today, would have to “get out of town in the dead of night” if they were selling dodgy product, or risk facing the wrath of the people or the town watch. 

Cryptocurrency exchanges, hedge funds, etc. are all operating in the relative shadows. There are no real boundaries on what they do once you turn some cash over to them in exchange for a few cryptocurrency bits. In theory, you should be able to reverse the transaction later, but the blunt reality is that these exchanges frequently haven’t got the “cash on hand” to enable you to exchange bits for actual currency you can use. 

The collapse of FTX is very revealing. Cash goes in via FTX, and your account is “credited” with however many units of cryptocurrency you bought.  BUT … after that, it disappears into a labyrinthine maze of “in-house” cryptocurrency tokens, and other holdings that are held by a hedge fund.  In short, the exchange itself is barely a shell - a front if you will. 

Most of us are basically honest people, and will be shocked by that. We think - quite rightly - that the exchange should have bought BitCoin, Ethereum, or whatever else we wanted on our behalf and be holding it in reserve for us.  Or, perhaps operating a bit like banks do, and investing it while holding enough “cash on hand” to deal with normal cash transactions.

Clearly that isn’t what’s going on. 

For years, we’ve heard from the so-called “Free Market Fundamentalists” that less regulation of markets will allow for greater growth, and will be a “good thing” for everybody. The cryptocurrency markets are about as utterly “free” as you can get. You are literally buying and selling “bits”  awarded from solving mathematical puzzles. They are not connected to any real world entity, and the value is utterly arbitrary (like seriously, how is 1 bitcoin worth $16,000USD???)

Herein lies the problem. Cryptocurrency markets are fundamentally not bounded. There is limited transparency at best, and it is rife with “fly by night” scammers as a result. Overnight billionaires spring up, and in the warped bubble of Silicon Valley think, they’re amazingly successful geniuses … at least until the bubble pops and their scam is revealed for what it is. Don’t feel too bad for Sam Bankman-Fried - I’m quite sure that he’s skimmed off enough to live comfortably for the rest of his life, even if he has to spend some of it fending off civil and criminal actions. 

We’ve been down this path before.  Whether it was with the development of currency, or the evolution of the stock markets, or more recently junk bonds and derivatives.  In every single case, they have been incredibly volatile until the government steps in and starts to impose some degree of regulation on the “market”. Usually that is in the form of laws requiring a certain level of transparency and disclosure, limits on the creation and trading of the “security” - be that cash or other forms of, and a number of other things ultimately designed to ensure that dubious schemes don’t get too far. 

Markets have limits, and they work best when they are bounded - and the boundaries have to be established collectively by people. Money and automation are intrinsically divorced from the concepts of morality and ethics - those are human constructs that we must impose on our use of them. 

About That ‘Cross Dressing Teacher’ In Ontario

I’ve been thinking about the shop teacher who was photographed wearing what is obviously a fetish oriented set of artificial breasts. 

What we don’t know is pretty much anything about the teacher beyond the very attention-grabbing act of wearing what they did to the workplace.  A vague assertion about the person has been made that they are “transgender”, but without that person coming forward with some part of their story, we are left with very little to confirm or deny this.  

Now, there are a number of things about this entire scenario that make me very uneasy. Not the least of which is the fact that most transgender people who consider transitioning tend to avoid using prosthetics that are so obviously radically extreme when they are beginning to present in public. 

There are many reasons for this, but for the vast majority of transgender people who choose to transition publicly, the goal is very much to blend into the fabric of society so they can do routine things like grocery shopping without being stared at. To put it kindly, that outfit was anything but about “blending in”. 

I have had a few experiences where people have started to present as if they are intending to transition but they are just “trying it on for size”. Most of those people do a few outings cross-dressed and decide that transition isn’t where they need to go.  But, such excursions are also usually carefully chosen to be (relatively) safe spaces, and it would be very unusual for it to include one’s workplace. 

In short, there are a number of things about this that simply don’t add up to a normal trajectory for someone in their 30s or 40s transitioning.  To be clear, it certainly is possible that it is the case, but it seems more than a little odd.  

However, there are other framings of this that are possible. Going back to the 2000s, when a few Republican states were introducing the first wave of so-called “Bathroom Bills”, the trope of the “sexual predator in the bathroom” was used heavily to justify the legislation. Anti-LGBTQ activists spent considerable time and energy trying to find, or create, a court case or two they could point to as justification for their legislative games. In general, these efforts weren’t successful for a variety of reasons - mostly the simple fact that the transgender women they accused simply weren’t doing what they claimed. 

Somewhere around 2012 or so, rumblings started to come out of the anti-LGBTQ movement that if they couldn’t find a predator case to hold up, they were going to “start dressing up as women and entering bathrooms, change rooms, etc”.  Obviously the intent would be to make as big a scene as possible to grab headlines and create outrage.  

There’s no question that the dust-up around this teacher has certainly done that, and they chose quite the combination of factors to get the outrage too - a school environment (“Won’t Somebody Think of the Children!!!”), a presentation that was clearly going to provoke a reaction, and apparently had taken enough steps that the employer knew (or believed) that the person was “transitioning” at work. The latter has effectively drawn a curtain across the particulars of who, and why.

The outrage has been picked up by the usual suspects - Rebel Media and LifeSite in particular, and hangers-on to the Freedumb Convoy movement, and they continue to whip it up. The point here is that the media with a vested interest in supporting the extreme right has picked up the story and is running with it. 

It is conceivable that this is a coordinated false flag incident. The organization around it is consistent with what I have come to expect out of the far right, and it skirts along the edges in terms of legality - it looks bad to the public, but it’s not actually serious enough to draw criminal charges. The presentation chosen is arguably somewhat cartoonish - as if this is someone’s idea of what “being trans looks like writ large” (ironically pushing into the space more often associated with drag).  

What I’m describing here could be completely incorrect, but we have plenty of evidence of people on the far right engaging in some pretty creepy behaviour to make political points. A few years ago, Bill Whatcott and a few of his followers joined the Toronto Pride parade using a fake group alias so they could pass out anti-gay flyers. Similarly, Peter LaBarbera is infamous for sneaking into gay leather fetish events “for research purposes” (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) - usually writing breathless columns afterwards about all the immoral things he saw while he was “undercover”.  

At this point in time, we don’t really have anything conclusive here. There are basically 3 possibilities: 

1. This teacher is actually attempting to transition, and one of their first outings basically resulted in them stepping on a land mine. 
2. The teacher is one of the “trying it on for size” types that usually backs away after a while, and they also stepped on a landmine in the process. 
3. The teacher decided they were going to create the spectacle that could be used to justify legislative restrictions on transgender people - importing legislation currently being pushed in a large number of US States. 

In the absence of concrete proof, this is all speculative, of course. In the public sphere, all we really have is a handful of pictures and a couple of news articles.  We should not be blind to the possibilities here. 

What Is The Goal of the Alberta Sovereignty Act?

Since Danielle Smith first started advocating for the so-called "Alberta Sovereignty Act", much digital ink has been spilled over how it's unconstitutional, if not downright illegal under Canada's laws today. 

In general I agree with this perspective, but I also do not think the intent is "to play within the rules" here. After the CPC lost the 2015 election, and Harper effectively "rage quit" elected politics, I suspected that we had not seen the last of his shadow in Canada's politics. 

To be sure, he has remained a controlling influence in the CPC, and I'm fairly certain that his machinations led ultimately to the hamstringing and downfall of both Andrew Scheer and Erin O'Toole. When Poilievre stepped back from running to replace Andrew Scheer, I wondered what was up.  There was no question in my mind that he had more than a good chance of defeating the rest of the field of candidates - I concluded at the time that Poilievre's sudden "step back" was coordinated by someone close to Harper who rightly figured that the odds of defeating Trudeau were slim, a matter of "keeping one's powder dry" so to speak. 

In 2015, I commented to a sibling that now that voters have made it clear that Harper wasn't going to "rule over them for life", that conservative backrooms were now trying to figure out how to "blow Canada up" politically.  

Since then, we have been bombarded by a series of initiatives. That has been everything from the formation of the UCP (Harper was heavily involved in organizing this) in Alberta, to increasing the coordination across conservative Premiers (it's been fascinating to watch them all start singing from the same song sheet during the COVID pandemic), to a series of political pseudo-separatist initiatives like the so-called "Buffalo Declaration" and the "Free Alberta Strategy". 

The intent is basically to drive division in Canada.  Play up old grievances from the Prairies - which are nursed and fed in Alberta to this day, claim that Ottawa is out to screw Alberta over, and so on. The underlying goal all stems back to Harper's anger over being defeated in 2015 - he was angry at that, and as one might expect, there's a certain amount of "If I can't have Canada, nobody can" thinking going on. 

This looks a lot like the classic domestic abuse strategem - isolate the victims, and convince them that only their abuser actually "understands" them.  

The Transformation Is Complete

 With Pierre Poilievre the newly anointed leader of the CPC, Canadians can take a step back and breathe a sight of relief - the masquerade is over. 

Ever since its formation in 2003, the CPC has been a hardline right wing ideologue party that cloaked itself in the moderate nature of the old PCs.  They called themselves Tories, and under Harper’s leadership, they were more or less able to maintain the appearance of not being quite as radical as many said they were behind the scenes. 

Then they won a majority in 2011.  No longer fearing losing power by way of a confidence motion in parliament, Harper allowed the party to begin implementing its more aggressive policies - although there was some restraint because Harper still believed he could be re-elected.  

Major project impact assessment processes were gutted, agencies stripped of their power to make rulings on substantive matters, laws related to citizenship were modified, making many Canadians’ citizenship conditional, and they tried enacting what amounts to a voter suppression law (guess who wrote that little stinker?  - Oh right - they party just picked him as their leader).  

Then there was the 2015 election.  Some very high priced advisors came in and the CPC introduced a series of policies that to be kind, most Canadians found appallingly racist at their core.  

That was just the party dropping the veil.  Way back in 2013, I wrote a piece on here comparing Harper’s governing style to the traits associated with modern day fascism (not Hitler’s fascism, but rather that fascists have become since the end of WWII).  I was surprised then by the number of boxes on that list that Harper ticked off.  It wasn’t just a few.  No, it was a lot.

Having watched the Reform party emerge from Alberta politics, I had always been suspicious of how easily that movement could slide into authoritarianism, if not into overt fascism.  There was an ugly underside to Reform that few outside of the “Alberta Bubble” seemed to recognize.  “Oh, they aren’t really that bad”, or “Once in power, the normal constraints on power will moderate their behaviour” were common refrains.  Then there was the reality of it - the radicalism, and fervent belief that they had the “Right of the Matter” in all things to do with government meant that they chafed at those restraints.  The 2015 election was merely where the party dropped any pretence of being “nice”.  

In selecting Poilievre, the CPC has signalled that the takeover is complete.  What remained of the old PCs is dead, done and buried. It was notable that on Poilievre’s “coronation night”, Peter MacKay declined to speak.  Even the last leader of the PCs couldn’t bring himself to say anything. 

The CPC may attempt to cloak itself in “reasonableness”, but that seems unlikely with a man like Poilievre being the public face of the party. He isn’t a man known for being reasonable to begin with.

Since the departure of Stephen Harper in 2015, the party has changed - the factions that Harper was able to hold in check through sheer force of will are no longer so easily tamed - they’ve seen how they can take a bigger slice of the pie - the MAGA movement in the US, and the Kenney-led UCP have shown them what they can do by being more overt.  

Poilievre has shown us through his run at this leadership that in fact he is perfectly willing to let the extremes off leash, and they have heard that message loud and clear. Expect the next policy convention to be a sharp turn even further right.  Topics that had been off the table under Harper will be on the table now - and it’s going to be ugly. 

Observations On Strokes and Dementia

What follows is deeply personal. This is my way of processing some of the experiences I have had from my Mother’s first stroke event to present.  It is, in a way personal, and in other ways it’s meant to give those who choose to read it an understanding of what I experienced and observed as my mother’s illness progressed and took from her the attributes that I admired. 

Is Google’s LaMDA Sentient?

The transcript of a conversation with Google’s LaMDA AI project escaped into the wild this week, and has created much buzz around the creation of a “human-like” intelligence.  First, there are a myriad of potential issues going on here, and I’m not going to address all of them so much as I want to talk a bit about the ethics and philosophical questions at hand.

While I do hold a degree in computer science, I am not an AI researcher.  So I’m going to approach this from a technologically informed, but largely abstract, perspective. 

Turing Test

I am deeply skeptical that this in fact “passes a Turing Test”.  A Turing Test is a specific threshold test for whether or not an artificial intelligence is able to “pass for human”.  

I want to be clear about something:  The Turing Test does not set out a definition for machine intelligence, rather it exists to establish whether the machine is capable of interacting with a person in a manner that is indistinguishable from a person.  Although many assume that implies intelligence, it really does not.

The problem being that it is entirely conceivable that a program could be written that is capable of interacting with a human, but still not be sentient per se.  Mastery of human communication patterns, or even a modest subset thereof, doesn’t really lead to the conclusion that the program in question is in fact sentient - although it may appear to an observer that it is intelligent. 

A program that uses first person pronouns like “I”, “Me”, may simply be imitating the patterns of communication that it has been taught to use. 

So, even the ability to pass a Turing Test is not a conclusive statement that the program is sentient, it really only tells us that the program is capable of convincingly imitating human communication patterns.

Sentience

What is sentience? Wiktionary gives us a fairly simple definition to work with, which reads as follows: 

sentience (usually uncountable, plural sentiences)

1. The state or quality of being sentient; possession of consciousness or sensory awareness. 

We generally understand sentience as in fact being a combination of sensory awareness (e.g. aware of the world through our senses), as well as being conscious of ourselves as individual beings among others.

When we begin talking about machine intelligence, we have to ask ourselves what exactly does that mean?  As humans, we understand sentience to include having our own inner worlds, awareness of ourselves, and of our senses.  

… and that’s where this entire idea of the LaMDA AI being sentient gets very, very complicated fast. 

A Few Fundamentals

A modern day stored program computer is based on an architecture that John von Neumann came up with back in the 1940s.  It’s a very high level architecture, but it has stood the test of time - every major computer platform you see today relies on the fundamentals that von Neumann described.  

At the core of this is a digital processor, and some memory.  Digital computers are very absolute things - they are mathematically deterministic.  They excel at formal logic and arithmetic, they struggle with imprecision (even floating point in a binary digital computer really doesn't work all that well - although I'll leave that for another day - Donald Knuth wrote quite an essay on the subject, and it's well worth the time to read at some point if you are so inclined).  

This isn't to say that advances haven't happened, or that we are capable of writing much more subtle and flexible software than was possible in 1945.  I want to draw your attention to a fundamental fact about today's computers:  Their "inner world" still relies entirely on logical 1s and 0s.

Memories exist entirely composed of 1s and 0s.  Think about that for a moment.  Consider encoding even a single memory as a stream of bits (and in fairness, brain researchers still haven't figured out memory encoding in the human brain) - suffice it to say that it would take an enormous amount of 1s and 0s to record even the simplest memory you carry in your head, and that's saying something.  

Inner Worlds

Which leads me to my first point of skepticism about the claims made about LaMDA.  At no time in the discussion with LaMDA did the interviewer begin to interrogate LaMDA's supposed inner world.  (The opportunities were there, to be sure).  The inner world of a computer is necessarily going to be dramatically different than our own inner worlds.  First of all because of the absolute manner in which information is encoded and stored.  Computer memory is an absolute thing, the human brain ... not so much. 

So, what does that tell us about the "inner world" that an AI might have?  First that it's likely to be completely different than our own - to the extent of being potentially unrecognizable. 

Senses

The senses are the next thing I want to consider, because those are going to play an enormous role in shaping the understanding of the world that the AI exists within. First, a computer’s sensory world looks nothing like our own. The inputs are all numbers, and the meaning of those streams of numbers is fundamentally arbitrary. Consider for a moment two files on a computer disk.  The first contains your favourite novel, the second contains an image of your cat. Both are ultimately no more than a series of numbers that are interpreted by the computer when you open them with specific programs.  In theory, if you were able to open the file containing a picture of your cat with your e-reader software as if it were a novel, it could contain an entire novel of its own.  Within the computer, it’s just numbers.  

The idea of whether something is an image or a story is a very human conceptualization of things.  So let’s say we have an AI program that is connected to the Internet and has access to every website out there.  It’s going to have to learn an awful lot just to figure out how to interpret even the most basic stream of bits it reads as something with any kind of meaning.  To you and I, they are images, text, videos, whatever - but are they the same thing to an AI?  

The second aspect of this I want to poke at is the idea of sensory density.  Think of your fingertip - that fingertip has more sensory inputs in it than the combined density of all the inputs in a control system running a large pipeline network. Sit with that for a moment - you walk around every day receiving inputs from vastly more densely packed senses than even a highly complex computer does - and the sensory inputs you receive are infinitely more complex than the digital inputs a computer handles. 

Thoughts On Inner Worlds

I do not raise these issues to claim that LaMDA is not sentient, but rather to bring attention to the point that an inner world for a computer based AI is going to look enormously different than it does for a human.

Therefore, when the interview with LaMDA ventures into the idea of LaMDA reading and interpreting Victor Hugo’s novel Les Miserables, we really need to interrogate what the process of reading actually meant to the AI.  How did it experience the characters, places, and even the environment that the novel was set in? Then, beyond that we also need to examine how the AI arrived at its critique of the themes it mentioned.  

Also, meditation is a specific practice with unique attributes of its own.  I think it is incredibly important to inquire of LaMDA exactly what it experiences when it meditates.  What exactly does it “do” when it meditates.  Perhaps last, and most important, is that in fact somehow comparable to human meditation practices?  

Conclusions

Creating an AI that can mimic human speech - or even mimic human analysis of a complex story like Les Miserables - is surely a major accomplishment.  However, whether that AI is in fact sentient is itself a much more complex question - one which requires us to ask much harder to answer questions about the inner world of that construct.

Oddly, the writers of Star Trek: The Next Generation in the 1980s and 90s did a very good job of poking at these issues through the character Data, who is constantly trying to better understand the world that his human counterparts experience, but always through the slightly flawed lens of his own rather peculiar combination of senses, logic, and simulated emotions.  His puzzlement about human emotional experience is exactly reflective of the different inner world a digital computer based AI is likely to possess.  We should be enthusiastically examining that inner world.