On limits of the computers

Lines crawl in to letters.
Letters cluster into words.
Word in to stories.
Stories show a part of the real world.
We go from one dimension (lines) to two dimensions (text) to three dimensions (story).
The written story emerges from the lines and the text, but text can only be understood from a higher dimension which provide context.
We cannot understand the story analysing the lines.

The computer's processor unit is one dimensional because it makes operation sequentially.
Now artificial intelligence try to use this one dimensional device to understand, two dimensional universes, such as pictures, or three dimensional universes such as the environment around a robot.

Will they succeed?
For me predicting future outcomes of emergent systems is like predicting the future:
On short term, in general you can guess it right, the universe has it's own inertia.
But on the long term, on specific instances you fail.
Maybe for understanding our 3D or 4D if you include the time, universe we need a machine that works in 5D.

About culture

I saw a documentary about dolphins, it seems that they have some basics of the culture, every pack of dolphins has its own way of hunting and its own language.
The learn from one another and the learn from their elders.
They have tradition and spreading of ideas,the corner stones of a culture.
Without them the random good discoveries would not be selected.
For example:
One guy used fire cook some rotten meat, other copied this method, some survived to pass to the new generation.  The new generation took this knowledge tried to produce by themselves the fire, everybody copied the idea, they passed to the next generation.

What is interesting in human society is that we have a conflict between tradition and novelty.
It is like it is a limit for how much change we can accept.
Maybe we are attached emotionally to the old ways and it is hard to give up, maybe it is a fear, maybe is a peer pressure.
From evolutionary point of view the novelty complements tradition.
I think the real breakthrough in spreading the ideas, was the printing press.
For the first time novelty spread faster than the tradition could keep up.
The printing press, later, radio and TV have formed communities. The editors has to use only one dialect of the language and enforced creation of a cultural language over a vast teritory.
Now the internet is spreading novelty faster but is 'balcanizing' the society: like minded people, with their own language, cluster and isolate themselves.

Narcissistic Europa

I have seen a documentary on Arte TV called Oh!Europe. At the end they speak about revolutions in '89 Europe forgetting the most dramatic one in which 1500 people died: The Romanian Revolution,.
First flame of revolution was extinguished in Iasi in 11-12 December when conspirators against the regime we re arrested, then  it started all over again in 17 December in Timisoara when army open fire   on demonstrators and in civilian buildings. One friend of mine told me that he left with parents their block apartment from Giroc street only to return at night and see the facade and windows pierced by bullets and pools of blood on pavement.
The wounded people from hospitals were shot and their bodies burned together with other victims. Their ashes were poured into the sewers. No one was found responsible.
On 21 December  Nicolae Ceausescu called in  for a meeting, the meeting turned against him, and people were dispersed. They made barricades at Intercontinental, and the light faded out in the evening shots were fired. They were around 100 braves, fortunately for them the soldiers were sympathetic  and didn''t shoot them unless ordered and then they fired away.
On 22 December workers assembled from factories in front of Party Central Committee, Ceausescu fled. After this the killing contained and 1000 more, died.
The chant on the streets those day was: 'We will die and we will be free'. I cry that was not heard from French revolution 200 years earlier.
 I don't know why this dramatic story doesn't fit in European picture ?
Only the west Europeans have fought for liberty? Values are more relative now because the left from the West was sympathetic to regimes from Eastern Europe?
Another topic that it was glossed over: 'The flying bridge to the Berlin' it was not only throwing packages with food from the airplanes. The US was ready to start a nuclear world war for defending that patch of land called West Berlin. If West Berlin fell, the Europe fell then the world fell to Stalin. It was freedom or death.
Ghinghis Han said that the walls are strong as the people defending them.
The last defending wall against soviets was the nuclear weapon.
If  the people in the '50 didn't had values to die for , and they were not ready to face a quick nuclear war than to endure a communist regime, the western Europe have folded.
Without american citizens believing in freedom and democracy you wouldn't have GI landing in Normandy and the Germany would be 'freed' by Soviets, more German women would be raped, more factories dismantled and sent to Soviet Union together with thousand of slave workers.
Without american help and pressure, the french and Germans would have bickered till today.
US because its cities were not bombed by Nazi Germany was the cool head in the allied camp who constructed a seed for future union.
 If in '45 the US would have been ruled by Trump he would reach to a consensus with Stalin: 'We take the European colonies, you take the western Europe'. Unfortunately today the US politicians don't have to even pretend that they  care about the democracy and freedom. Freedom means options for common folk, and if the common folk has options it can't be squeezed of the last dollar.
Another remark:
The two women from video are saying something like: 'Americans throw food packages in West Berlin and napalm in Greece and Vietnam'
I never heard about napalm used in Grece civil war as I never heard of Americans fighting there.
Regarding the Vietnam civil war, US supported the non communist side and bombed the northern communist side. The communist and people from the north didn't represent  all Vietnamese otherwise you would not have the dramatic images of helicopters overcrowded with civilians leaving Saigon and the boat people.

Europe unification it seems inevitable, in 1945 Europe could be united either by Hitler (he had support of former enemies such as Vichy France), either by Stalin  or by US and UK.

What technologies will be used in World War 3?

In world war 1 it was used some mature technologies such as railways, artillery and machine guns, some new technologies such as the tank,the plane and radio and as weapon of mass destruction the poisonous gas.
In second wold war the previous novel technologies were matured change the way the war was conducted (think of plane,tank binome). New technologies appeared such as computer,jet engine and the flying bombs(V1 and V2) . The previous weapon of mass destruction gas was not used but it was invented a new one: the nuclear bomb.
So what is next for the thirtieth world war?
The novel technologies from WW2 are matured: V1 is the cruise missile, V2 is the ballistic missile, jet planes are developed, the computer is the backbone of planning,logistics and of the cyber army.
What are novel technologies for WW3?
Satellites? Drones? AI?
What it will be the WW3 weapon of mass destruction?

Fighting people is harder than overcoming nature: why large organisations fail

I saw the Russian movie Salyut 7 movie in which a team of 2 Russians cosmonauts try to fix orbital station with same name.
Problems in cosmos are man made, we went where we are not suppose to be, with our faulty technology.
In the movie fighting communist bureaucrats was harder than to sent 2 people in space.
Alexis de Toquevile said in 1812 work "About democracy in America" that USA will overcome Russia because in USA you fight mostly with nature, while in Russia you fight against people.
Overcoming nature is easy, nature is honest, measurable, it doesn't have a position to protect, it doesn't blame on you, it is punishing you fairly if you make stupid mistakes.If an organisation is hierarchical complex, more time and effort you dedicate to politics, and more you trade off safety and technical craftsmanship for political gains to forward the project.
Kennedy had to make some facilittes in Houston TX to "bribe" Texas senators to support his space program.
Another example where political compromise had affected safety is Challenger who was launched regardless of engineering warnings because of political pressure.
Another one is Boeing 737 Max, in which management didn't ensured the safety of the plane for desire to make profits.
We can discuss the morality of  these decisions where people caved in to the pressure, despite the fact that they didn't risk deportation in Siberia.
It seems that regardless of the political system (dictatorship in URSS,democracy in USA) the organisations too big to fail make serious blunders.
The reasons is two fold:
First: they are powerful organisations and their management wasn't challenged enough. Prussian army during Bismarck was a new army and had to fight stronger opponents. The German army during WW1 was respected army and failed.
Bankers till 2008 were not challenged seriously by a crisis.
Second: concentration of power. Economies of scale and military power concentrate power in hands of few people that are unchallenged. So a bad decision is transmitted to lower level and the company crashes with terrible force.
Solution? Make things smaller an multiples as in this article.
The democracies are more robust than absolute monarchies because the leadership is shared, and limited.
The death of the king plunged the country in a civil war, the death's of Lincoln,McKinley and Kennedy didn't affect very much the american democracy.

Natural cybersecurity

The scandal of cybersecurity with Huawei made me think more about it.
The power of IT business is that if you find a solution you scale it fast.
But the weakness is that you have an error you scale it fast.
Life is scaling fast without cyber security problems, because the existence of death.
Think at a organic virus as a cyber attack. Virus enters in a host use its resources to replicate then moves to the next host,but the most greedy viruses kill their host and don't replicate.
So the epidemic dies off. The death of the host select also more "benign" viruses.
It seems that today plague,leprosy or syphilis they are less dangerous as their medieval ancestors.
What if we could implement the cell death in our chips?
Let's say that we can implement a monitor (internal or external)  that shut down devices if they are behaving strangely and reroutes the flow of information toward other devices.
The acts will have local limited impact.
But the danger is an autoimmune reaction in which protection measures could block the network.
Maybe an random reaction will limit  the capacity of an attacker to use the protection against the network.
For sure you will need hardware redundancy and this will increase costs.
But you can have also a software redundancy by using 3 different kernels using different data sources and making an arbitrage between result of the kernels.
If all the actors will adhere to security standard protocol, the 5G development will be more secure.

About identity

I just a watched a Joe Rogan podcast with Eddie Izzard, a comedian that I like for his smart jokes.
For my surprise I found out that he oscillates between being a man and a woman.
I heard about people who felt that they were a woman in male body or vice versa, but never about a person that changes its gender monthly.
That made think about identity.
I think that till 18-25 years our identity is determined by our environment.
Your gender, to what climate you were born, in which continent, in which culture, in which family you live mark your development forever.
So if you want to know who you are you should look around you and understand.
Only after you take decisions and you modify your environment, which in turn affects you, you start to have an identity that is somewhat independent of your environment.
This might explain why people rationalise their motives. Their actions make part of their identity, and since people in general love themselves and consider that they are good, this means that their actions are good or at least had good intentions.
So no wonder criminals blame the victims for their acts.
The oldest example for this is the ransacking of Troy and killing of population who was explained by Homer by the kidnapping of Helen by Paris.
Also by removing the rights to act  of a person you can prevent it from developing an independent identity and the person can be the prisoner of the group.
This can be seen in how the women were treated in world wide till second world war and how the women are still treated in some Muslim countries.Also it is evident in communist countries were private initiative was stifled and decisions were took by some bureaucrats.
Maybe the lack of options to develop an independent identity explains the Stockholm syndrome, where hostages identify with their captors, or the Nazi doctors who could  kill children because during work hours they identify themselfs as SS.
But lets return to the case of Eddie Izzard. He tells that he was harassed because he was dressed as a woman.
This makes me wonder which is the threshold were you should accept  the opinion of others and change your identity.
If you believe that you are good singer despite evidence, then you will continue to ruin your life by pursuing a career that is dead end and you will alienate you friends who don't want to hear your screams.
On the other side if you are a good singer, and everyone is bullying you, you might ruin your life because you limited yourself.
I don't have a god answer, but the best way is to try and see if it is working.
By trying I know for sure that I am not a good musician. :)