Google's Magic Touch, or, Quantum Supremacy is the Thing to Have

Stretching while the sun peeped over the horizon this morning, I pried open one eye to enjoy this interesting headline:

"Today Google officially published in the journal Nature an article claiming their 53 Qubit Quantum Computer solves a problem in 3 minutes and 20 seconds that it would take Summit, the world's largest supercomputer, 10,000 years to solve"

Whoa! Wut? Rilly?

Note that IBM has been working on this problem for more than 2 decades and has been the leader in this field, with a well-developed infrastructure, a couple of generations of in-house experience, and teams of experienced engineers. And Google surpassed their efforts - in less than a single decade. 

Note that the largest area of application of quantum supercomputing is solving cryptography problems - i.e., breaking encryption. As I learned in my Cryptography class (Prof Dan Boneh Stanford), all cryptographic algorithms depend on the length of time it takes to crack them, which is brought to nearly zero by quantum computing. ALL of them. 

Which explains Google's interest. 

Good morning! We're doomed. 

Ham Radio's Amazing History as Volunteer Emergency Communicators vs Google...?

Hello friends! Some of you may know that I am a ham radio operator, in fact trained as an Emergency Communicator (EC) in the glorious state of California, where I spent many weekends and evenings in training, listening to lectures, schmoozing, and otherwise hanging around with some of the most amazing engineers in the world. Silicon Valley is the best place to be a ham. And I was proud to be trained and ready to help as part of an EC team if necessary. 

Fast forward a decade+ or so and I found the following fascinating Google Tech Talk from 2013 about how Google is positioning themselves to be the most powerful emergency responder in the world, WOW, and how they will use internet bandwidth during emergencies to get critical information through when needed.

You can be sure their system will eventually be determined to be a more valuable use of bandwidth anything civilian, such as packet or digital radio, and that their internet-wide technologies are more efficient and robust than any civilian ham radio efforts can ever be.

You can be sure DARPA is funding this research arm of Google and also that gov't will be able to determine what information goes through in an emergency, and which geopolitical areas get priority.

Google has a damn good system set up, no denying it, backed by a huge and powerful infrastructure which is resistant to outages and is pretty much impenetrable. Large amounts of emergency bandwidth will be allocated to them and away from public use when deemed necessary by government.. 

Their communications project is extremely well-done. A high level of government funding helped them get there. My geek bump thinks this  is utterly fabulous. Alas, the implications of their success to society is dreadful. It is pushing out civilian contributions, and thus further disempowering citizens. It is taking the power of communication out of our hands. The government and large corporations do not always know best, even when informed by technology and AI, even when really cool, no no nope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCvbNAD8tfc&list=PLAD8A7B6D66DDD297&index=19&t=0s

The Mathematical and Game Theory proofs of the possibility of Ethical Consensus

OK, ok, I know the title sounds sort of impenetrable. Actually its a much bigger subject than I can cover in my blog anyway. So this post is really just a place where I scribbled some thoughts to share.

Interestingly, this paper can be used as model re: the impossibility of ethical consensus:

https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/jacm85.pdf

The process is inevitable, and it is up to our generation to point out and solve the *very* deep ethical issues with AI making ANY human-level decisions. 

With the tools described in this paper we can try to do this using logic, not opinion or emotion. No one paid attention to the clear impossibility of securing UNIX back in the day and look at the trouble, insecurity, and expense that has caused!

-------

One of my personal heroes, John Nash, addressed an aspect of this very issue we're discussing as we consider the struggle for privacy.

Think of corporations and government agencies as the virus (albeit with more adaptive tools and an exponentially faster response ability) requiring each individual to mount a sort of immune response (which is linear, not exponential) to protect private information. 

Individuals are forced to attempt to design an optimal, effective response in order to preserve information they deem private, or essential to protection of their assets which includes agency and freedom of expression. This paper gives guidance in proposing a solution.

"....in “Defensive complexity and the Phylogenetic Conservation of Immune Control” by Carl Bergstrom.

The main idea in the paper is of coevolutionary struggle between a host's immune system and invading viruses. 

This is of the theme of "arms races" or "evolutionary arms races" where species compete to evolve faster than the other (this nomenclature comes directly from political arms races like in war). There are two sides to this-- one is that you can try to run faster than your opponent, and the other is that you can try to slow down your opponent. In the case of Bergstrom's paper, the immune system slows down the virus.

Roughly, the virus is trying to crack the immune system's code and the immune system is trying to prevent this. The virus learns the immune system's code, then the immune system makes the code more complex, then the virus learns the new code, and so on. What's peculiar about this case is that a virus can go through an entire evolutionary process while the host is, in many ways, the same. So why doesn't the virus just dominate? How can the immune system keep up?

Bergstrom et. al. find inspiration in a particular arms race that was happening in the 1950s involving creating and breaking codes (cryptography). Quoting a letter written by John Nash (who, in addition to game theory, worked on cryptography-- you can find the quote in the paper), Bergstrom connects breaking codes as a human activity and a virus-host interaction. The idea presented by John Nash is that it is possible for a code to grow or change in linear speed while its decryption grows in exponential speed.

In other words, the immune system in a host cannot compete with a virus in terms of evolutionary speed (the virus is much faster). However, the immune system can slow down the virus by moving slowly itself (linear speed) and causing the problem faced by the fast-moving virus (cracking the code) to grow exponentially."

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1211.2878.pdf

 (From an email sent to members of the Complexity Explorer, made by SFI professor, Prof: Santiago)