God and Man (and Machine)

The past year or so has seen an incredible explosion about "artificial intelligence" (AI). Much of the discussion has focused on potential threats to humanity from machines - job losses, Terminator-style dystopian fantasies about the rise of SkyNet. Hackers.

Some of these threats seem more real than others (spoiler: the machines do not have to replicate human intelligence; they just have to be good enough. So yes. Most of the jobs of today are in fact at risk.)

But one thing I find intriguing is something not discussed.

What do we owe our creations.

A few years ago, the film Blade Runner was released. It is a movie based on the dystopian novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by the science fiction writer Philip K Dick.

The (brief) plot-line is that there is a race of androids called "replicants" that have been engineered with narrowly circumscribed super-human skills. For various reasons, the machines are banned from Earth, in part because (I suspect) of the apparent threats that they pose to people. The anti-hero of the movie is a bounty hunter named Decker (played in the film by Harrison Ford). It is the job of "blade runners" to eliminate any replicants that alight on the earth. In the novel (but not the movie), it is revealed that Decker himself is actually a replicant.

A question posed by the movie and increasingly now in our AI-evolving world is, is it moral for blade runners to hunt and kill replicants? 

What do we owe our creations? 

I’ve not seen the original Blade Runner in several years, but the question of whether it is “morally right” to kill the replicants - and the more existential question about what rights the replicants themselves have - is a terribly complex one in my mind’s eye.

Now, I’ve read some of Philip K Dick’s work. The question of what defines humanity itself is embedded in the story. I don’t recall clearly whether the replicants are in the film are revealed to be fully human, cyborgs (cybernetic organisms - part organic and part mechanical), or fully robots. In the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the “replicants” are mechanical in nature.

It reminds me a bit as well of the movie AI: Artificial Intelligence. In that story, also of a dystopian future, human beings have created machines that increasingly simulate human beings. Like the replicants in Blade Runner, the machines are designed to fulfil specific “needs” of people. There are workers, sex robots, and of course, the protagonist of the story, David, who simulates a child for a couple whose natural-born human child is in a coma.

Both stories, to me, raise questions:

What defines humanity? Is it our physical, outward appearance? Our sentience? Our ability to feel (or simulate) emotions and empathy? Is it simply our DNA?

What responsibilities do we as creators owe those things that we create? I think about this from time to time in an eschatological sense - as a believing Christian, we believe that human beings were created by God himself in His image. Other monotheistic religions have similar systems of belief.

If God made man, what does God owe mankind?

The people in both Blade Runner and AI have created nearly perfect simulations of themselves, placed them on the Earth, and have responsibility for them. In some ways, this is similar to the relationship between God and man.

In a purely practical sense, most people accept that it is moral to defend the helpless, and in Blade Runner, Roy (the leader played in the film memorably by Rutger Hauer) has killed a number of people. Some, it could be argued, in defence; others in revenge (e.g., Tyrell, the head of the Tyrell Corporation, who make the replicants). Others for no reason really given (Sebastian, who befriends Roy and Pris). Roy is dangerous to people, some of whom have nothing to do with the creation and mistreatment of the replicants. In this sense, it is arguable that killing Roy is a protective measure, and thus is defensible.

In a larger sense, the issue of whether it is moral to create sentient humanoids simply to serve as slaves with intentionally short lifespans, and who are aware that they will die in approximately five years, must be grappled with.

So it’s a morally ambiguous situation that, beyond asking whether it is moral to kill the replicants, one should ask what responsibility we have to those things we create.

Like it or not, and John Searle to the side, we are getting close to the point where we, like God Himself, are making arguably sentient beings in our own image. So I suspect we should begin to at least think about what our responsibility to our creations might look like.

There Is No Going Back

 

Yesterday, my family and I went to see what is likely to be the final Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

It's not a bad ending for the franchise - plenty of action. Some one-liners. Nice cameos for Jonathan Rhys-Davies (Salla) and Karen Allen (Marian). 

The vehicle, both literally and figuratively, is a device that actually does exist, the Antikythera mechanism, which was discovered for real in a shipwreck found in 1901. Now, the device is unlikely to have actually been constructed by Archimedes, but many consider it the first real computer. It could not do what the movie implied, but it was obviously way, way ahead of its time. 

I have written a fair amount about technology - how it changes life, what the pitfalls as well as benefits for humanity are. Mainly, I think what tech does is enhance what we are capable of rather than changing our nature. With the rise of so-called "AI," and most notably and recently, Chat GPT, I was thinking about how the current young people cannot imagine a world without some of the inventions that are now more prosaic. Mobile telephones. Tablets. The internet.

As Gen-Xer, I would start by pointing out that the AI and the internet are technologies, much like others. And they obviously have had and will have a profound impact on life.

But are these changes more significant than others. More than, say, the automobile? The telephone?

My wife, son, and I during COVID began watching the television show Downton Abbey, and in Season 1, the manor house gets its first telephone. Everyone is mesmerized by it, save for the dowager mother of Lord Grantham, who views it with cynicism and suspicion.

The younger servants in the house (e.g., Thomas) could be said to be the “last generation to experience what life was like before the telephone.”

Every invention that came before us, to our conscious minds has always been there. My grandfather was born in 1908, so for him, although the airplanes became a routine device, it had not always been around, and it surely was not ubiquitous.

I can remember when I was first exposed to a computer (in 1981, an Apple II+). I clearly remember my first modem (a Hayes 300 baud device that you put the telephone receiver to, circa 1983). I can clearly remember trying to send documents via email using uuencode and uudecode. Then Stuffit, then WinZIP that did everything automatically. Then you could just drag and drop files into an email.

The internet has, more than any other of these inventions, had a massive impact on culture. My son is 16, and he simply cannot imagine the world without it. The idea of going to a library, sorting through a card catalog, getting books, and doing research that way is as odd to him as would be using a telegraph to me. Hell, he has never seen a real encyclopaedia, or had the thrill of waiting for the “update” that came every year in an extra volume to augment the now out-of-date information.

Almost everything he needs or wants to know, he can get in minutes from a tiny device that’s the size of an old Texas Instruments led calculator that I used to use.

That puts information at his disposal that 16 year old me could not dream of.

On the other hand, it also means less human connection. “Relationships” are often virtual. Friends are icons on a screen. I got a glimpse of this in graduate school, where one night, two people waiting for their simulations to converge (I got my degree in mathematics) were using a live chat whilst sitting at their SUN work stations.

They were sitting in the same room.

I thought it odd, and dysfunctional at the time. I couldn’t imagine things like WeChat or twitter then.

So something gained, and something lost.

We gain information, we lose human connection.

In short, it’s a Faustian bargain. Like all technology is. It’s up to us to use it wisely.

And finally, I do not accept the premise that it will never be the same again. The Romans at one point had engineering and technology that along the way got lost. It took humanity in some case centuries to learn back what was known.

It would be incredibly hubristic to think that we cannot fall to the same situation as they did.

You Were Made as Well as We Could Make You

 

My sister last night (my time - she is three time zones ahead) posted an image in social media. One I haven't seen in quite a while. It's an analog photo that had been scanned in, a bit yellowing now with age. It's a photo of my father, in his Navy uniform, holding my baby brother James, outside our then home in suburban Los Angeles. Garden Grove, California to be more precise.

I don't know if the photo was taken the day that my mother and father brought my sister and brother home from the hospital, but it's plainly in the very early days of their lives. (My brother and sister are twins).

Today is my father's birthday. He would have been 80 years old this year. But of course, dad lost his battle to cancer many years ago. This summer, it will be 27 years in fact.

Looking at that photo, I see a baby whose entire life remains, and I see my father, who was then a young man. Much younger than I am now. At the time, nobody knew, nobody could know, what life had in store for my brother, my sister, or my dad. That's the bargain. 

One of my very earliest memories was the day that my parents returned from hospital with my brother and sister. I can recall pretty clearly them being absent in the final days before the twins were born, and the excitement of the day that all came home. I remember the anticipation and happiness of getting the chance to hold them - sitting in a chair; I was three and a half then. I have an older brother, 11 months my senior, so until that day, I was the youngest. Charles and I each got a chance to hold our new siblings. To meet them and welcome them to the house. 

Now, from time to time, I think of that day. The memory seems pretty clear, perhaps too clear in my mind. So at this point, I cannot say how much of the image I can recall is real, and how much of it has been constructed over time. A shadow, re-enforced by suggestion and by my own imagination. In the film Blade Runner, the replicants (artificial humans) are given "memories" of events that did not happen. But to the replicants, they are as real as they could be, and I guess, help define their humanity for them.

As time is passing, the distance between when dad was alive and here and today grows longer. 27 years is not so long ago for me now. Time has a way of shaping our view of the past, and I suspect, softens the hard light that shines around the things we would rather not see. God has given us in the way we remember the past a precious gift that is more powerful than an airbrush. More of what constitutes our brief time on earth becomes photographs and memories all the time.

I think about my father a bit every day. A bit more so on his birthday. A bit more on the anniversary of the day he left us behind here. I thought he was an old man, as I suspect, every kid thinks about their parents. I am now about two years on the south side of the age he was when he died. I don't feel like an old man, although I sometimes do not recognize the face that now looks back at me in the mirror. 

I've said it before, but human beings are not machine-made. Real things risk imperfections. We are made as well as we could be, but we break. We age. Ultimately, we leave behind photographs and memories and stories.

All too often, we measure our lives by what we've done. My father was a surgeon. Part of his job was fixing imperfections of people when they fell and were broken. A part of it was assuring that my brothers, sister, mother, and me had lives that were made as well as they could be. His life wasn't one that politicians talk about, or that get profiled in the newspaper. His alma mater will never name a building after him. 

Dad wasn't a 'great' man. But he was a good one. 

A critical lesson that I did not know then, but I think I grasp now, that I have my own son who is just a couple of years removed from becoming an adult, is that what is truly valuable in living is not the toys you accumulate or the pictures of vacations that you take. It's not the house you live in or cars you drive. 

I've reached some level of success in life. I've had the chance to see the world, made a good career. People offer congratulations.

But the truth is this:

Much of what I have been able to do is because of the things my parents couldn't. Their sacrifices were my opportunities. The things I got to see were the places they missed. 

Now that I am decidedly on the back nine, that's how I hope my life measures when I am a photograph in a book. My own son will have his own life. He'll make his own choices, and ultimately, measure out his happiness and success by the yardsticks he decides. My hope is that when he is my age, he will look at how I spent my life and my time the way that I look at my old man, who didn't get the chance to get "old." 

If I can measure to half of that tally, that's a life that I can defend as great in a meaningful and not platitudinous way. 

80 years old. 

Happy birthday, dad. Thanks for how you invested your life in your family. In me.

I miss you a lot.

Humanity on the Treadmill. Or, in the Blender

Came across an interesting "study" that is to be carried out by the founders of Y-Combinator, a self-proclaimed "start-up incubator" here in the San Francisco Bay Area.The founder of that outfit, Sam Altman (who bears no resemblance to the comical Ehrlich Bachman on the HBO show "Silicon Valley" - AVIATO!) announced about a year ago that he was interested in testing not how companies might behave, but people.

The idea on Altman's mind is to a small-scale test of the impact on people (and feasibility) of the introduction of a "Universal Basic Income."

Briefly, the UBI is a concept by which an entity (most likely, the state) provides to all of its citizens a basic, floor income. The idea is not new, and has been floated (and endorsed) by the likes of the uber-libertarian Milton Friedman. Under the scheme, every citizen would be granted a certain amount of monthly or annual stipend, irrespective of work of any sort.

It's whose appeal I find increases the more I consider:

1. The growing role of automation in delivering goods and services
2. The rising challenge beyond our shores in countries with wage demands and standards of living well below what is necessary to be considered "middle class"
3. The increasing concentration of wealth at the top
4. The ascent of near-human artificial intelligence
5. My own empirical observation of the clash of the increase of skills needed to "make it" versus an apparent dystopian devolution in actual skills present (well educated, skilled people have fewer children at later ages while people lacking education and skills have larger families at younger ages. Think: the central premise of the movie "Idiocracy."

I think a lot - perhaps more than is healthy, about what is going to happen as the machines and the underclass grow. I've written more than once about my particular views with respect to AI. But in a nutshell:

1. I reject that machines will ever replicate human intelligence in anything more than a simulation (good)
2. Artificial intelligence will not be a perfect simulation (good)
3. It doesn't have to be (uh-oh)

Steve Wozniak some years ago, in talking about the future of machines, put it this way:

Will we be the gods? Will we be the family pets? Or will we be ants that get stepped on? I don't know about that … But when I got that thinking in my head about if I'm going to be treated in the future as a pet to these smart machines … well I'm going to treat my own pet dog really nice.

The erstwhile mathematical and political blogger John Derbyshire several years ago described what is happening in the workplace and beyond in a somewhat dystopian view that has stuck with me since first I read it:

The assumption here is that like the buggy-whip makers you hear about from economic geeks, like dirt farmers migrating to factory jobs, like the middle-class engineer of 1960, the cube people of today will go do something else, creating a new middle class from some heretofore-despised category of drudges. But… what? Which category of despised drudges will be the middle class of tomorrow? Do you have any ideas? I don’t. What comes after office work? What are we all going to do? The same thing Bartleby the Scrivener did, perhaps, but collectively and generationally.

What is the next term in the series: farm, factory, office…? There isn't one. The evolution of work has come to an end point, and the human race knows this in its bones. Actually in its reproductive organs: the farmer of 1800 had six or seven kids, the factory worker of 1900 three or four, the cube jockey of 2000 one or two. The superfluous humans of 2100, if there are any, will hold at zero. What would be the point of doing otherwise? [emphasis mine]

Machines that can function as lawyers or doctors - they will need people to make, train, and maintain them.  But I suspect not on a 1:1 basis.  Likely not on a 10:1 or 100:1 basis.  That's an awful lot of smart, educated people who are going to have to find something to do.  

The current trends are scary (a guy with graduate degrees working as a salesman at Macys). It's going to be ugly for even the educated. Worse, as bad as such a future will be for the educated, it's going to be cataclysmic for those lower down the education scale.  Someone perhaps capable of graduating high school or perhaps completing a couple of years of community college is going to find that he is competing for jobs with men and women who are much smarter than they.  

The "solutions" (universal pre-school, 'free' community college) are going to bump into biological realities.  And fast.

If you want to see a real horror movie, forget about a guy in a hockey mask. Check out this video, entitled "Humans Need Not Apply."

This is where the UBI may come in.

The EU is already looking at the future - a vote was taken this past year in Brussels to examine taxing robots as they enter the workforce as a means to take care of the human workers they will displace.

The research that Altman proposes will provide random people with $1000 per month, over five years. People given the money will not be required to do anything in return for it, and at the beginning and end of the 60 months, people will be interviewed on their behaviours and choices. Did you work? Doing what? What did you spend the money on? 

How did you pass the time?

The sociological research question implied is: without work, will our lives have purpose? Is an intrinsic part of humanity to create things? To do things other than entertain ourselves? The ultimate leaving behind of any sort of work, and what its effects on how people see themselves is a critical question.

But the question that is unasked is this: What sort of impact will it have on the tiny number of 'producers?' Producers, not in the sense that Republicans talk of "makers and takers," but of those whose job it will remain to come up with ideas and visions? That shrinking set of individuals will potentially have enormous power and control.

I'm reminded of the image of the future from HG Wells's The Time Machine. The protagonist - never actually named - goes far into the future, and encounters two creatures. One (the Eloi), look like perfectly formed, beautiful human beings. They cannot speak and lack much more than the sort of intelligence one might expect of a domesticated animal.

The horrible truth is revealed, of course.

In our real future, under a UBI, when the overwhelming majority of people don't have to actually do anything to acquire survival, will we lose as the Eloi did?

And what sort of Morlocks will tend to us? 

Steve Wozniak recommends to be extra nice to his dog. But will our future Morlocks view us with compassion?

The history of mankind is not encouraging.

Ex Machina, In Our Image

 I'm an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over, and the insect is awake.

-- Seth Brundle, protagonist of 1986 sci-fi flick, The Fly

In the children's classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, there is perhaps no character more tragic than the Tin Woodsman (in the book, his real name is Nick Chopper). His story is glossed over in the 1939 movie that derived from the book, but shortly, Chopper was once a man of flesh and blood who came from a family that earned its living chopping trees to make lumber for the sale in Munchkinland. Alone following the death of his parents, he eventually found a love, and proposed marriage. The girl to whom he was engaged was a handmaiden to an evil woman who feared losing her services. The old woman made a deal with the Wicked Witch of the East, who cast a spell on the ax of Chopper. Each time that the ax was swung, rather than striking its targets, it chopped off an arm, a leg, which was replaced by a prosthetic one made of tin.

Eventually, Chopper came to be made entirely of tin after quite literally, cutting away every ounce of his human form.

I thought of the Tin Man as I read this article in the New York Times, which describes a current "ethos" common here in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

The term "hustle" is making its way into the local lexicon, used to describe essentially the desire of younger "entrepreneurs" to set aside family, friends, vacations - their youth - in order to be the next internet billionaire star.

From the piece:

“Hustle” is the word that tech people use to describe this nerd-commando lifestyle. You hear it everywhere. You can buy hustle-themed T-shirts and coffee mugs, with slogans like “Dream, hustle, profit, repeat” and “Outgrind, outhustle, outwork everyone.” You can go to an eight-week “start-up hustle” boot camp. (Boot camp!) You can also attend Hustle Con, a one-day conference where successful “hustlers” share their secrets. Tickets cost around $300 — or you can pay $2,000 to be a “V.I.P. hustler.” This year’s conference, in June, drew 2,800 people, including two dozen who ponied up for V.I.P. passes.

I'm decidedly outside the target demographic, of course. But to me, "hustle" is not a recipe for success. It's not a euphemism for "workaholic".

It's a con. It's a one-word synopsis of "I'm a dysfunctional human being who cannot relate to human beings in any sort of real way, so I pretend my imitation of some pointless 'app' is going to disrupt the world to salve me missing soul."

I think a lot about so-called "artificial intelligence" (AI), and have written several times about it. There is a great fear that machines, ultimately, will replace us. I cleave to the school of thought advocated by John Searle that 'real' (strong) AI is not going to happen. Not soon, anyways. Machines capable of thinking in any real sense that can perfectly copy humanity are not on the horizon.

Of course, they do not have to be.

But this is the first time I've really thought about the opposite. Not machines that copy human beings, but humans who simulate machines.

The primary character in the 1986 The Fly film accidentally melds his DNA with that of a house fly in an experiment trying to teleport himself, with catastrophic consequences. 

The Tin Man ends up a mechanical thing longing for a heart through the malice of a witch.

But in Silicon Valley, young people, eyes wide open, are voluntarily chopping away their humanity. This, I had not considered.

Machines will not copy people; but if we ourselves become machines? 

The Tin Man is said not to have a heart, and goes off to Oz to seek one from a charlatan wizard. One of his fellow travellers, the Scarecrow, is said not to have a brain.

Menlo Park's Yellow Brick Road - Sand Hill Road - may lead to an Emerald City filled with VCs. But those who voluntarily give up their humanity are going to find that it does not lead to any wizard. Those who trade away their humanity to a false wizard's promise of worldly "disruption" are, to me, equal parts Scarecrow and Tin Man.

They are giving away their hearts - and their youth - so that they can deliver a better way for you to order a pizza and track it with your mobile phone. And as a bonus, you can do it without ever having to deal with the unfortunate nuisance of human interaction. A drone will drop it at your front door.

I was once 25 years old, living in the Valley; I worked for seven years in a "start up," and at times worked ridiculous hours in the pursuit (with my colleagues) of  'disrupting' the world (we didn't use the word 'disrupt' 20 years ago, however). Like many today, I reckon part of that was because I had few friends beyond the company, and went home (when I did) to an empty, quiet house. Work filled up a void. I suspect that this has not changed. 

The road may (for some) lead to wealth; for many others, it will not. For both, they may find (when they get to my age) that what was given up is not worth what was gained. They will discover that the world that they disrupted was their own.

In the end, the real Tin Man got his heart, of sorts. But at the end of Sand Hill Road, there is no wizard, and there will be no missed youth to be returned, magically, from an otherwise empty bag.

An Unplanned and Chaotic End

Just two days ago, I shared some of my thoughts on Charlie Gard, a tiny English baby born with a congenital, terminal ailment that has destroyed his little body over the past year. 

His parents have struggled with the child's doctors and the hospital that has been his home now for most of his brief life. Chris Gard and Connie Yates, the parents of little Charlie, have been in a legal battle with the famous Great Ormond Street hospital in London (perhaps most famous as the beneficiary of the proceeds of the classic Peter Pan children's book and its offspring on stage and screen) over how best to care for the little boy.

The condition Charlie suffers from, "infantile onset encephalomyopathy DNA mitochondrial depletion syndrome," is incurable and ultimately fatal. An experimental therapy is available in the US, but has not as yet been demonstrated in randomised, controlled trials to be safe and effective, and thus remains outside the canon of approved treatments; Columbia University professors had agreed to allow compassionate use for little Charlie, and a "Go Fund Me" charity was set up that would have more than paid for the expense of bringing the child and his parents to New York, but in the UK, doctors can block treatments, even if the parents wish that their child receive them, if they decide that the treatments are not in "the best interests" of the child.

Ultimately, the High Court agreed with the doctors, and Charlie was not allowed to come to the US.

The final wishes of the parents of Charlie were that he be allowed to return home for his final day (or days), away from the hospital, the noise, the press. The lawyers for Great Ormond disagreed, and again, off to court the case went.

Today, a decision has been handed down by Mr Justice Nicholas Francis that Charlie is not to be sent home, but rather, to a nearby hospice. The reason given was that such a move would be "too dangerous" and might bring about an "unplanned and chaotic end to Charlie's life," according to reports.

The story itself is extremely distressing - no little boy deserves this sort of fate; nor does any family. 

I asked then, and now, what defines "humanity?" I would think, how we take care of the truly helpless in our midst. Surely, a little boy qualifies, doesn't he? Have the courts acted humanely? I'm not so sure.

When someone dies, especially unexpectedly, we often hear how the person died "suddenly."

Life - and its cousin, death - are like that. For all of us. Death is always sudden, isn't it? You're alive. And then you aren't.

"An unplanned and chaotic end." The very words, issued by the hospital defending its choice, are haunting.

Death is almost always "chaotic and unplanned," isn't it? 

Charlie Gard will be one year old if he is still alive in one week - his birthday was on the fourth of August last year.

I think Charlie Gard has deserved better than this in his final days.

Au Delà Je Suis Charlie

One of the gifts - and curses, I suspect - of age and the passage of time is a certain creeping circumspection of things that we had not considered as young people. These days find a growing chorus of noise about artificial intelligence, the place of machines, and what is to become of human beings when our creations can outreach us.

I think a lot about what it means to be a human being; what defines our humanity, what rights does it afford us?

And what obligations as well?

Today is a significant day for our family, personally. 23 years ago I lost my father after a short battle with cancer. This is, as I have said before, the last year of my life that my dad will have been in it for more than half. (Next year, I will be 48, and my father, gone for 24 of those 48 years).

My dad battled his cancer as he could, attending radiation therapies, walking each day when he could to build his strength, and enduring a course of chaemotherapy. All, ultimately, could not help him. 

I've been somewhat casually (if I am being truthful) following the story of little Charlie Gard, a tiny little boy born in England last year, afflicted with a horrible genetic condition called "infantile onset encephalomyopathy DNA mitochondrial depletion syndrome." Little Charlie was apparently a normal, healthy baby when born, but who, a month later, began to display symptoms of weakness. He had difficulty lifting his head.

The disorder is a terminal one that rapidly depletes the mitochondrial DNA (mitochondria are, in layman's terms, called "the power plants of the cells"), resulting in initial weakness and eventual systemic failure. No curative treatment is available, though there are experimental therapies involving nucleosides that may prolong life and improve the prognosis.

Research is primarily in the USA, and funds were quickly made available through "crowd" and other sourcing to pay for the expenses of bringing little Charlie to New York. However, the law in the UK intervened - the doctors at the famous Great Ormond Street Hospital reckoned that the treatments, which are not curative, would not improve Charlie's quality of life. His parents disagreed, and the courts ultimately sided with the hospital.

Charlie would not receive the experimental treatment, and later, when his condition deteroriated, the Court again sided with the hospital (against the wishes of the parents) to remove life-support from the baby.

Today, Charlie is in the news once again - his parents, having exhausted their appeals, have asked to bring their son home so he can die there rather than in a hospital. Incredibly, the hospital again argues against the wishes of the parents, and the Courts once more will decide.

I confess that I do not know enough about the science involved to render an intelligent opinion of what, medically, is 'best' for Charlie. While I am not a medical doctor, I am a parent, and I can only imagine the horrible position his parents are in.

As a personal aside, during my wife's pregnancy with our son, at one point an ultrasound revealed potential "soft bio-markers" for trisomy-18, a catastrophic genetic condition that is prenatally fatal in more than half of all cases, and fewer than 1 in 10 infants survives to his first birthday. Our son was healthy in the end, but waiting the three days for further test results is, honestly, one of the most terrible times in my life. I am and will be eternally grateful that we were not forced to confront horrific alternatives.

As fate would have it, little Charlie Gard and my father share the same name.

It's, again, not my point to argue what the process in the UK is, or that the Court has made an error. 

But I am troubled, again, by questions of what defines our humanity. What obligation do we have to those who, literally, cannot speak for themselves? Who could be more helpless than a newborn? Who, more deserving of our protection?

I am haunted by the images I have seen of a robed, bewigged judge telling a mother and father that, no. Your child is not going to be allowed, despite your wishes, to be taken for an experimental treatment that may (but also may not) help him. 

Is little Charlie suffering? Would extending (or not?) his life further that? I have no idea - but I doubt that Mr Justice Francis does, either. I have a sneaking suspicion that part of the debate is with an eye towards allocating precious health care resources in resource-constrained environments.

In another context here, I read a French philosopher and ethicist called Chantal del Sol, state that motherhood is

...not the making of a baby in utero through the act of insemination.  A child is not a product, or a thing; it is not an object, but rather, a person.  That is why we have a word - procreation - to distinguish birth from say, a glass-maker or a manufacturer.

Human beings are not products. 

We hear a lot these days about this or that "right" that each of us does or does not have. I agree with some, but more often than not, what I hear are "rights" more or less boil down to "you have to pay for my choice to do X."

The most fundamental right we have as living beings is the right to live. What I feel is a real measure of our humanity is how we stand up for the voiceless. The truly weak.

I cannot help feel that, in this case, humanity did not perform terribly well on that test.

Ground, She's Moving Under Me

They made us too smart, too quick and too many. We are suffering for the mistakes they made because when the end comes, all that will be left is us. That's why they hate us.

One of the many moments of the (in my opinion, very under-rated) movie AI: Artificial Intelligence that sticks with me, a decade later, was the discussion between Joe and David, the protagonist of the story. Both, you see, were "mecha," mechanised human beings created for various "needs" of humans in the not distant future.

David, abandoned by his "mother," has determined that it is because he is not real, and seeks answers as to how he might become human and thus, regain her affections. Joe, designed for other purposes, tries to explain the situation to David, and does so starkly.

The past few weeks - indeed, months and years - have been quite tumultuous, both in the US and abroad. Yesterday, the new president of the USA, Donald Trump, held a somewhat rambling press conference, in which he lashed out at various news and other media outlets for creating "fake" news stories. He kicked the whole thing off with a declaration that he was left "a mess" by his predecessor.

Later last night, I was watching a brief debate between former Secretary of Labour Robert Reich (served under Bill Clinton), and libertarian economist Stephen Moore. Reich belittled Trump's claim that there is any mess, and cited a number of economic statistics - low unemployment, a booming stock market, job and wage growth - as evidence. His discussion wound up with the conclusion that Trump, economically, was left a "gift" rather than a mess.

I find this description from Reich, who now is a professor across the bay at UC Berkeley, odd, as he has for years been beating a basso ostinato about the growing gap of rich and poor in the modern economy. Apparently, that no longer constitutes a problem.

Mission accomplished.

Of course, the truth is far murkier than a 10 second political talking point, and the continued erosion of the American middle class represents a tremendous threat. The phrase "President Trump" attests to the rising anxiety, and that anxiety does not derive from whole cloth.

Yesterday, a vote was taken in the European Parliament in Brussels regarding the growing ethical concerns of the rise of the machines. (Apologies; the article is in French).

Over the past year or more, an increasing number of people, including voices who know like Elon Musk (Tesla) and Steve Wozniak (the real brains behind Apple), are warning of a potential dystopian future that real artificial intelligence may birth. Two years ago, Woz had this to say:

Like people including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted, I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people. If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they'll think faster than us and they'll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently. 

Will we be the gods? Will we be the family pets? Or will we be ants that get stepped on? I don't know about that … But when I got that thinking in my head about if I'm going to be treated in the future as a pet to these smart machines … well I'm going to treat my own pet dog really nice.

The vote in the EU Parliament started a legal discussion of what the responsibilities of "thinking" machines should be. A fundamental axiom of western law is that guilt must be tied to understanding. To commit a crime, one must grasp it. With respect to conscious machines, if they are capable, they can be culpable.

Just how the law will deal with a robot who, perhaps motivated by jealousy or anger, destroys another robot? Kills a person? The EU is talking about these issues.

Equally, concerns about the future obsolence of mankind are now making the rounds. The evolution of our economy has always focused on creative destruction. But increasingly smart machines change that calculus in a fundamental way.

The argument since the rise of machines is that automation is part of creative destruction - the automobile put the buggy whip maker out of business, but created jobs for the mechanic.  The ATM reduces our need for bank tellers, but requires people who can make, program, and maintain the devices.

The central problem with this argument is the assumption that there is no upper limit to human abilities; that we will forever be able to create new occupations.  That does not seem to me a sustainable view.

Machines that can function as lawyers or doctors - they will need people to make, train, and maintain them.  But I suspect not on a 1:1 basis.  Likely not on a 10:1 or 100:1 basis.  After all, an L1 class in law school does not have as many professors as students.

This necessarily means that an awful lot of smart, educated people are going to have to find something to do.

If the current trends (e.g., the guy with graduate degrees working as a salesman at Macys) hold, as bad as such a future will be for the educated, it's going to be cataclysmic for those lower down the education scale.  Someone perhaps capable of graduating high school or perhaps completing a couple of years of community college is going to find that he is competing for jobs with men and women who are much smarter than they.

The "solutions" (universal pre-school, 'free' community college) are going to bump into biological realities.  And fast.

What the EU is discussing is a robot "tax", the proceeds of which will provide a universal, basic income. The end of work, so to speak. This has pluses and minuses, of course; humanity has long dreamt of lives free of the need to labour, allowing us time to create, to think, to spend time with our familes and friends. That is all a terrific side effect.

But it also may remove a fundamental imperative of humanity - to feel useful. Maybe we will redefine utility, but I am not optimistic.

I've read the so-called "Strong AI" argument of John Searle, and I find it very persuasive. I do not believe that we are near the "singularity," nor do I believe that humanity will create true AI. Not in my lifetime.

But in reality, we do not have to. Machines have to be just good enough, and they are rapidly approaching that mark. What then?

A couple of years ago, I wrote this piece on the topic, and quoted erstwhile mathematician John Derbyshire, who in his own book imagined the future thusly:

The assumption here is that like the buggy-whip makers you hear about from economic geeks, like dirt farmers migrating to factory jobs, like the middle-class engineer of 1960, the cube people of today will go do something else, creating a new middle class from some heretofore-despised category of drudges. But… what? Which category of despised drudges will be the middle class of tomorrow? Do you have any ideas? I don’t. What comes after office work? What are we all going to do? The same thing Bartleby the Scrivener did, perhaps, but collectively and generationally.

What is the next term in the series: farm, factory, office…? There isn't one. The evolution of work has come to an end point, and the human race knows this in its bones. Actually in its reproductive organs: the farmer of 1800 had six or seven kids, the factory worker of 1900 three or four, the cube jockey of 2000 one or two. The superfluous humans of 2100, if there are any, will hold at zero. What would be the point of doing otherwise? [emphasis mine]

Yesterday, in the EU, we have an image of humanity standing on a beach.

The tide just rushed out, rapidly. Few noticed it; the story was not even reported in the US.

I suggest that it is time - maybe past time - to start looking for a tree or hillside.

Counting, Counting. Always Counting

Cartoon (c)The Atlantic, May 2012

The French philosopher and polymath Descartes summed existence in saying, "cogito ergo sum." (I think; and thus, I am).  Presuming that one accepts this definition of humanity, it seems naturally to follow that one would ask, "OK; I am.  But what, exactly, am I?"

There has been an enormous amount of noise recently about exactly how people see and sort themselves.  I've been living in France for a couple of years, but I am not French.  I have crossed from young adulthood into middle age.  I was once a sports fan, but I don't pay much attention any more.  I've been a student and single.  I'm now a married and the parent of a little boy.

What I am changes.  What you are does as well.

But if I look in the mirror, there is a couple of things that do not: I am undeniably "white" and male.  And whether I define myself this way, the world around me apparently does.  Reductive or not, those are the little boxes I reside in.

Recently, here in California there has been an awful lot of shouting about 'micro-aggressions' and 'privilege,' two terms that were not in the vernacular 10 years ago; at least not in the way that they are used now.  At Stanford, one of the schools from which I was graduated, and before that, UCLA, much of the yelling is in part driven by what is being called the B-D-S movement (boycott, divest, sanction) against Israel for imagined and actual transgressions.  And it's revealing fault lines that I suspect have existed for some time, but have been ignored or papered-over.

Jewish students at the two universities, vying to be members of their respective student governments, have been asked if they could be objective judges on so prickly a topic.  Unsurprisingly, the subjects of the interrogations take great offense, and there are increasing cries of anti-semitism.  

I suspect that, hidden behind much of the aggressive questioning, and indeed, the anti-Israel sentiments on campus and more broadly are motivated by anti-semitism.  Anti-semitism is not a particularly new virus.

But what's different this time is those engaging are not right-wing nuts, but people along the same ideological spectrum as those they attack.  Stanford and UCLA are not particularly conservative institutions.

From the debate at Stanford, comes the core issue here:

Jews are not treated like other minority groups. The New York Times recently published an article titled “Campus Debates on Israel Drive a Wedge Between Jews and Minorities”. Though I did not know Jews were no longer a minority, this distinction contains a certain logic. Jews sometimes claim to be a marginalized minority, expecting the support of the Left, but often find themselves spurned, even though 70% of American Jews vote Democrat. Instead, the Right, which often lambastes other minority groups’ claims of victimhood, embraces our cause. 

The Left vitriolically defends female, black, and Latino college students from the smallest microaggressions, ensuring that no one feels appropriated, excluded, or unsafe, but Jews are not given the same benefit of the doubt in similar circumstances. When allegations involve ‘anti-semitism’ instead of ‘racism,’ the Left suddenly rejects students’ subjective experiences. Maybe the Left, like the New York Times reporter, subconsciously does not identify Jews as minorities but instead as paragons of privilege who do not need protection. In the eyes of the Left, Jews became a part of the dominant power structure, and thus forfeited their status as a victimized class.

It seems the classic "who, whom" conundrum posited by Karl Marx.

In California, there is no longer a single, majority ethnic group, so what defines a "minority" is very much in flux.  And with the spoils associated with being in the right status, and with the march of complaints descending further into an argument about fractals, each group is trying to solidify its position as, in the words of the Stanford writer above, Elliot Kaufmann, a "victimized class," the endgame is a sort of turf war of grievances, 

No one wants to be "white" these days.

It's in a sense reached it sort of logical apogee where Apple CEO Tim Cook seeks to carve out a space for himself as a put-upon, bullied victim despite millions (billions?) in wealth, fame, and power associated with running perhaps the world's most well-known company.

It hits a sort of personal sore spot for me.  No; I accept that I am a white, cisgendered (whatever that means) man, and am in a position of 'power' (unlike Tim Cook, Barak Obama, or Sheryl Sandberg, I guess).  I swear, I will use my powers as a middle-manager in a small company most of you have never heard of for good. 

No; the issue is, as we divide further into ever smaller affinity groups, I am curious where that will leave my son, who doesn't really "fit" into the boxes society defines.

My nine year old is of mixed ancestry.  

I read today an article in New York magazine about an ultra-liberal private school in New York City that has for decades been ahead of the social justice curve, and its attempts to combat racism in the face of micro and macroagressions (discussions of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and the Baltimore riots are sprinkled, well, liberally in the piece) by creating groups for the students, and then forcing each kid into one of them for segregated discussions about 'difference.'  'Privilege' also gets tossed in, with no apparent sense of irony in a school- Fieldston - whose tuition is north of $40,000 per year.

There is a telling comment from one of the school's Asian students:

“It’s so fricking boring,” said a fifth-grader in the Asian group. “We do the same thing every week. The conversations we have are mostly about the tensions between whites and blacks, and never about Asians or Hispanic people. It annoys me sometimes that people are like, ‘Oh my God, people are so segregated.’ But we are never mentioned. It’s just frustrating, I would say.”

For better or for worse, in America, ca 2015, 'diversity' almost universally boils down to black and white.  If you stretch, "hispanic" might get mixed in, particularly here in California.

The comedy of another Jewish parent arguing with a black woman that Jewish people aren't really "white" adds to the melange of political correctness that is rapidly approaching parody.

One of the families in the article profiled is of mixed ancestry - the father is half Jewish and half Irish (is he "white?"  In 1910 he would not have been), and the mother is from Colombia, and hence Latino (itself an ad-mixture of European and native American ancestry).  The two children discuss their discomfort at being forced to choose which peg to be hammered into.

When I was a little child, the discussions were of a hopeful future where these sorts of exercises would vanish away as we became more integrated and aware/accepting of others.  "E pluribus unum" meant something, even if Al Gore botched the Latin.

How did we get here?  Where we are unwinding in the other direction?

For those of us who have families that do not fit the mold, it's a source of some anxiety.  If my own son were asked, "What are you," or worse, through these sorts of machinations forced to ask himself "What am I," I'm not sure what the answer would ultimately be.

For him, and for us, that's a painful discussion.

But for the society as a whole, the question itself is a tragedy.

A Future So Bright, You Have to Wear Shades?

When the End Comes, All That Will Be Left Is Us

Today, I came across this interview given by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.  IMHO, Wozniak was the real brains behind The Fruit Factory, whereas Steve Jobs was the guy who understood what the market wanted, or perhaps more accurately put, telling the market what it should want.  

The Woz was being interviewed by an Australian journal after a recent announcement that he had applied for and received permanent residency in that country.  His son lives in Sydney, and Woz has apparently long fostered a desire to "live and be buried" in the Land Down Under.

Among the topics Wozniak held forth on was his increasingly dim view of the future of mankind in a world of artificial intelligence.  He joins an increasing list of impressive minds (Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk) warning us of the risk of summoning the demon, as they say.

The basic idea is quite simple and familiar to anyone who has seen one of the various films in the catalogue of dystopic futures (The Terminator franchise, Logan's Run).  Humanity create computers and/or robots with true AI, the machines, not being subject to the same biologic limits as human beings, quickly become "smarter" and faster than their creators, and subsequently become our overlords.

With catastrophic consequences:

Like people including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted, I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people. If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they'll think faster than us and they'll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently,

Woz imagines a few alternatives for human beings:

Will we be the gods? Will we be the family pets? Or will we be ants that get stepped on? I don't know about that … But when I got that thinking in my head about if I'm going to be treated in the future as a pet to these smart machines … well I'm going to treat my own pet dog really nice.

Aside from the fact that one ought to treat one's pets "really nice" irrespective of how our future turns out, I remain unconvinced of the proposition of real "AI."  I've written before about how I view the threat of AI, but suffice it to say that I am an adherent to John Searle's argument against "strong AI,"  Essentially, machines will never really be thinking or understanding in the sense that people commonly describe them; rather, they will be made to simulate these processes.

But Wozniak, and Musk, and certainly Hawking are to be listened to when they warn of these risks, Of course, machines do not need to do more than simulate intelligence with reasonable effect.  The problem here is what responsibilities we abdicate to machines.  How much autonomy we give them rather than how "smart" they are.

A more pressing question I would pose to Woniak et al is the immediate future of a workforce where machines can simulate the jobs we do.  A couple of recent publications, including the book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis by Harvard researcher Robert Putnam examine the reality that the ability to win and maintain life in the great American middle class has become increasingly challenging.  It's well-reported that wages have been more or less stagnating since about 1972, and that the trend is accelerating and for larger cohorts of Americans.  

Many reasons are offered - the usual suspects about racism, corporate rapacity, educational deficiencies.  But what to make of the reality that machines that can simulate human beings with greater skill can plainly replace us?  The argument since the rise of machines is that automation is part of creative destruction - the automobile put the buggy whip maker out of business, but created jobs for the mechanic.  The ATM reduces our need for bank tellers, but requires people who can make, program, and maintain the devices.

The central problem with this argument is the assumption that there is no upper limit to human abilities; that we will forever be able to create new occupations.  That does not seem to me a sustainable view.  

John Derbyshire wrote in a book entitled (without irony) We're Doomed:

The assumption here is that like the buggy-whip makers you hear about from economic geeks, like dirt farmers migrating to factory jobs, like the middle-class engineer of 1960, the cube people of today will go do something else, creating a new middle class from some heretofore-despised category of drudges. But… what? Which category of despised drudges will be the middle class of tomorrow? Do you have any ideas? I don’t. What comes after office work? What are we all going to do? The same thing Bartleby the Scrivener did, perhaps, but collectively and generationally.

What is the next term in the series: farm, factory, office…? There isn't one. The evolution of work has come to an end point, and the human race knows this in its bones. Actually in its reproductive organs: the farmer of 1800 had six or seven kids, the factory worker of 1900 three or four, the cube jockey of 2000 one or two. The superfluous humans of 2100, if there are any, will hold at zero. What would be the point of doing otherwise? [emphasis mine]

Machines that can function as lawyers or doctors - they will need people to make, train, and maintain them.  But I suspect not on a 1:1 basis.  Likely not on a 10:1 or 100:1 basis.  That's an awful lot of smart, educated people who are going to have to find something to do.  

If the current trends (e.g., the guy with graduate degrees working as a salesman at Macys) hold, as bad as such a future will be for the educated, it's going to be cataclysmic for those lower down the education scale.  Someone perhaps capable of graduating high school or perhaps completing a couple of years of community college is going to find that he is competing for jobs with men and women who are much smarter than they.  

The "solutions" (universal pre-school, 'free' community college) are going to bump into biological realities.  And fast.

More from Woz, who spent a few years as a teacher after he became independently wealthy:

Computers in schools were very new when I was teaching, and they didn't really succeed. They didn't change how smart we'd come out thinking; we're just more powerful at getting answers and knowing things by using the internet

The idea that methods or tools will make people "smarter" is not grounded in reality.  These tools increase the reach of our existing abilities.  They extend them.  But they do not change their nature.  Much like the fact that better running shoes allow human beings to run faster, they cannot make us fly.

And in this case, the machines will always be able to carry out "mental" tasks faster than we can.

So I am not terribly concerned about the threat of AI to humanity.  The economic challenges posed by "smart" machines are going to be nasty, and they are going to arrive much sooner,  Some argue that they've arrived already.

I suggest that people like Wozniak and Musk should be much more concerned about the immediate future of human beings rather than the ultimate fate of humanity.

Steering AWAY from a False Equivalency

The Popular Press Get the Wrong End of the Stick.
Again.

When I think of Australia, my age and space belie me.  Huge cans of Foster's beer.  Crocodile Dundee.  Dingoes eating babies.  Terrible Outback Steakhouse adverts.  

Yes; I know that that last one is not really Australian.

Today, the news out of Sydney is horrible.  An Iranian refugee, admitted to Australia in 1996 seeking asylum, took multiple hostages in a crowded Lindt cafe, holding them captive for several hours before finally killing two of them and himself being killed when police raided the store.

All this, a week before Christmas.

Australia, like many western countries, is currently doing a great deal of soul-searching about just how many and what sort of refugees to grant asylum to.  I live in France, and the EU is similarly beseiged by asylum-seekers.  Thousands are currently in a camp in Pas-de-Calais in the north of France; they don't want to stay in France, preferring the far more generous welfare benefits afforded in the United Kingdom, just a few dozen kilometres to the north.  The UK is not a full signatory to the Schengen agreement, and thus the refugees are not entitled to free entry from continental Europe.

The bloodshed is tragic here - two people are dead, after all, plus the terrorist himself.  The killer, a self-styled "cleric" and "sheikh" was named Man Haron Monis, and according to reports, was well-known to Australian police for a series of offences, including accusations of accessory to murder, sexual assault, and of sending malicious and threatening letters to the families of Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

In short, he's not exactly a sympathetic figure.

But aside from the feelings of disgust I feel about the senseless loss of life, I am truly puzzled by the reaction I am seeing in various quarters, including social media and the New York Times.  To wit, there is a significant set of stories about the "right reaction to terrorism" being displayed by Australia's citizenry.  The "IWillRideWithYou" hymnal.

According to news reports, during the stand-off, trending news lionised an apocryphal incident that took place on a Sydney public bus, wherein, an apparently Islamic woman, apparently out of fear of a backlash, removed her hijab - the scarf many Moslem women wear for religious purposes of modesty to cover their hair.  A fellow traveller assured the woman that she should replace her scarf, promising to ride along and protect her.

The indicent quickly became a meme, popularised in part by a professional writer and semi-professional activist called Tessa Kum. Kum blogs and 'tweets' frequently about the evils of the world - typically men, and specifically, white men.  White men are guilty of sexism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and a host of other modern sins.  

A quick look through her blog finds not a single mention of mention of the crimes committed by Islamic fundamentalists, let alone a condemnation.  I might have missed them, as she is quite prolific in churning out 10,000 word screeds.

Now, I stiuplate that all of the above - racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia - are all bad things.  They are to be condemned.  Blaming Moslems en masse for the horrific actions of an evil man is wrong.  Women on buses should not be the targets of threats or intimidation because of a terrorist act by someone whom they share no connection other than being co-religionists.  And it's great that non-Moslem Australians are willing to stand up for "the other."

But in this instance, are people like Kum not taking the wrong end of the stick?

Thus far, I have not seen a single report of a Moslem or a person of middle eastern origin who has been the victim of violence following this attack.  I've seen no news stories about a refugee beaten or a mosque burned.

The victims in Sydney are not Moslems.

They are two people named Tori Johnson and Katrina Dawson.  They were not insulted or ridiculed in tweets (the apparent crime claimed by Kum and others).  They were shot and killed.  By Man Haron Monis.

They won't be harrassed by tweets, or badgered on Sydney buses.  They won't be coming home at all.

The victims are the dozens of people who were terrorised for hours by a gunman, welcomed to Australia as an asylum seeker.  They include a couple of pregnant women.  They include a Sydney policeman, hit in the face with shotgun pellets.

The REAL Victims in Sydney.
Will You "Ride with Them?"

The story in Sydney is not about the possibility of a "backlash" - whether real or imagined.  It is about the killing of two people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  The western world has truly lost its mind when the prime fear becomes whether a particular group will be the victim of some mean tweets or social media posts.

Blogger Mark Steyn hit the nail squarely on the head in writing:

Sorry, but that doesn’t “restore my faith in humanity”. In fact, it makes me think humanity, or at any rate civilization, is doomed. The mythical “backlash” against Muslims is such a dreary staple of these stories that I might as well just rerun my shtick from a dozen or so backlashes back:

Stage Four: The backlash that never happens. Because apparently the really bad thing about actual dead Jews is that it might lead to dead non-Jews: “French Muslims Fear Backlash After Shooting.” Likewise, after Major Hasan’s mountain of dead infidels, “Shooting Raises Fears For Muslims In US Army.” Likewise, after the London Tube slaughter, “British Muslims Fear Repercussions After Tomorrow’s Train Bombing.” Oh, no, wait, that’s a parody, though it’s hard to tell.

Indeed. Usually the Muslims-fear-backlash crowd at least waits till the terrorist atrocity is over. In this case the desiccated multiculti saps launched the #I’llRideWithYou campaign even as the siege was still ongoing – while Katrina Dawson and Tori Johnson were still alive. Muslims are not the victims here. Ms Dawson and Mr Johnson are the victims. And yet the urge to usher Muslims into the victim chair and massage their tender sensibilities is now so reflexive the narcissists on Twitter don’t even have the good taste to wait till the siege is over and the corpse count is known. Far from a restoration of faith in humanity, it’s a glimpse of how advanced the sickness is.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott is asking the the question polite people dare not ask:  WHY WAS THIS GUY NOT ON ANY OF THE APPROPRIATE LISTS:

How can someone who has had such a long and chequered history not be on the appropriate watch lists and how can someone like that be entirely at large in the community?

I would add, "why was he still in Australia to begin with?"

At some point, the people who lead our nations need to stop asking what is "good and fair" for refugees and others seeking to enter, and start asking what is right and fair for those already here.

There are many who believe that what will be remembered from Sydney will be #IWillRideWithYou as a reaction to an imagined backlash.

I hope it will be about two innocent people who were killed in part because our leaders forgot that their primary responsibility is to serve and protect their people from killers like this.

I hope we will remember Tori Johnson and Katrina Dawson, not Tessa Kum.