The Thorny Sides of Impatience

Back in the days when I was looking for a job, I read an article on job interview tips. One talked about how to handle interview questions, such as, "What, if any, do you consider your weak points?" It was the one question considered likely to be asked, usually after  the applicant's well rehearsed recitation of his or her strong  attributes.   Saying, "I don't have any" is not a good answer as it would sound a little too arrogantly pompous or unreasonably over confident. The go-to answer the article advised was to say: "I find myself impatient at times, often expecting others to do the same, whether the task is important or not".  That answer would have covered  the "weak point" part while conveying to the interviewer the applicant's go-getter attitude and willingness to tackle assignments head-on in the shortest amount of time.

Fortunately, no such question was asked of me when I went for job interviews so I never had the chance to test and/or prove the technique's relevance or validity.  We know patience's nobility but the thing is, should impatience be considered a virtue or not.  Can we safely say, "It depends"?

History is filled with stories of how impatience "paid off" and where they resulted in disaster.  Naturally, too, we see how it affects us, see it in others and the role it plays in many social and work experiences, but it seems that both good and bad come out in unequal doses where patience and impatience are concerned.

Did Colonel George Armstrong Custer and 270 of his men die at Little Big Horn on June 16,1876 because he was too impatient in committing his troops too prematurely into battle against the Lakota and Cheyenne warriors when he could have waited for perhaps another day or two? Some historians speculated on that. 

On another page of history, at the crucial point of WWII, General Leslie Groves was picked to head the Manhattan Project in September, 1942.  Hitler's Germany was rushing to produce the first atomic bomb. The Allied forces did everything to thwart the plan but meanwhile the U.S. was working furiously to do the same - achieve the biggest game changer of that conflict.  Gen. Groves was picked for a lot of reasons, including his ability to manage huge U.S. Army Corps projects, including construction of the Pentagon building earlier in his career, but he had the reputation of a very impatient manager, a "doer" and effective  administrator and "driver" of men.  The Manhattan Project finished and successfully tested the first atomic bomb in record time and the rest is history.  That was the upside of impatience because had the Third Reich got to the bomb first, world history would have been written a lot differently from what it is today.

Driving through traffic, waiting in line for anything anywhere, or simply waiting in general are everyone's peeve. 

Let's be reminded, however, that compared to a few centuries ago we know the human mind, even its physiology, was acclimated to waiting for long periods of time. It took a "grueling ten weeks at sea", that's two and a half months, for all 102 passengers on the Mayflower to cross the Atlantic from England to reach what is now the coast of Massachusetts. The human body and mental capacity to endure managed to survive that one and similar subsequent voyages that followed, though not to be ignored, were tragic consequences for many of the hapless voyagers. 

Today, trans-Atlantic travelers would often grumble to no end about the 2-4 hours of pre-flight "ordeal" waiting for a plane trip that would take 8 hours from London Heathrow to JFK airport in New York. So, literally one may eat breakfast on one continent and have dinner on another. The Concorde, during its relatively short service, shortened the gap to between breakfast and lunch when it flew from Heathrow to JFK in 2 hours, 53 minutes. Do we know how many meals the Mayflower passengers ate (when they could) and threw up in those ten weeks?

A study I read somewhere showed that internet users who are used to high speed internet service (2000 to 5000 Mbps) are likely more impatient than those only able to download at the "snail's pace" of 182 Mbps.  Let's put this in perspective.  Mbps stands for Megabits per second. 182 Mbps would still be eye-popping fast when compared to the telegraph transmission a century ago, or the teletype and fax machines that followed. Today, at the click of a mouse we see audio/video appear on screen in full high definition  at the rate of many multiple frames per second. But we are more impatient today than those who marveled at the Pony Express delivered mail.  By the way, that program of using relays of "horse-mounted riders" did not last but for a little over a year, between April,1860 to October 1861, and only between Missouri and California.

Imagine for a moment what our hunter/gatherer ancestors went through. The hunters often took hours or even days to take down prey.  The gatherers spent most of their days foraging for plant-based edibles of berries and fruits and tender leafy greens. Unfortunately, from the moment they learned to be impatient, the psychological and physiological changes that followed laid the foundation for what ails much of society today.

There is hope to reverse that. 

You are driving, following proper traffic etiquette, on a single lane of cars lining up to enter the main road or highway, when one driver cuts in front of you. You feel instantaneous uncontrollable seething that would bother you for quite a bit of the entire driving experience. Try this sometime instead. Whenever another driver signals intention to squeeze in front of you, ease up and let the car through and see how  euphoric it feels  compared to feeling irritated. It will amaze you how so much better you will feel the entire trip.

Various studies had shown that on, say 20 blocks of normal traffic, cars that weave in and out of lanes to get ahead, will likely get to the last block ahead of those who drove steadily with the traffic flow, by ten, twenty but not more than thirty seconds! Was that all worth it? 

On the flip side of that, if not for impatience nothing will get done on time or ahead of schedule. If not for impatience the Panama and Suez Canals will not have been completed.  Both canals have shortened transit times for cargo and passenger ships by a remarkable amount.  Much of the scientific and economic breakthroughs were driven by impatience.

Therefore, the long and short of it, pun very well intended, we do need the thorny sides of impatience and all the gently undulating nature of patience. Perhaps on a 7-to-1 ratio, patience-to impatience?

Meanwhile, experience something - if you have not had it before - by willingly, if not gladly, letting someone through ahead of you. It's the one facet of human nature that we can conceivably do with little effort. Yet, it is strangely true that it is not just psychologically pleasing but it is actually physiologically healthful, for "a steady heart rate and stable blood pressure are preferred in anyone navigating to get from point A to point B", what a cardiologist might say.

"A certain amount of impatience may be useful to stimulate and motivate us to action. However, I believe that a lack of patience is a major cause of the difficulties and unhappiness in the world today".

Joseph B. Wirthlin

  

A.I. The Sum of All Our Fears?

Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) was and still is in the news lately with a seemingly well established shelf life that could last for quite a while, if not indefinitely, as reliance in computer and information technology has become deeply intertwined, fused even, into our lives. Furthermore, it has become a modern day boogeyman, except that it is adults that seem to worry.  People in the high tech sector, business leaders, military officials even, and politicians alike have expressed concern. Elon Musk thinks A.I. could conceivably end human civilization.

In 1970, I recall what I then thought was a B-movie science fiction, "Colossus: The Forbin Project". I am surprised to learn recently that it has garnered an 88% in Tomatometer ratings (Rotten Tomatoes); quite remarkable for a film made 53 years ago.

Movie Plot: "Colossus" was a super-advanced computer/military defensive system created in the U.S., located deep into a granite mountain somewhere in the Midwest; spearheaded by Dr. Forbin .  It was powered by its own self-contained nuclear reactor, sealed from interference from the outside once the heavy doors were shut.  It had the ability to repair itself and, more importantly, it was designed to totally deter any nuclear attack by other nations and respond autonomously. That is to say, it was capable of launching U.S. warheads on its own. Humans, including Dr. Forbin, can communicate with Colossus only via terminals linked by cable. The U.S. President declared that "Colossus was the perfect defense system".

Not long after it was operational, "Colossus" detected that there was another computer like itself, named "Guardian", located in the Soviet Union.  I will stop short of crossing the spoiler alert line except to say that the two supercomputers started communicating with each other.

Elon Musk actually first made his warning on A.I. way back in 2016.  He must know a lot more today so his concerns, along with others, couldn't be trivialized.  Worth noting is that as early as 1940, Isaac Asimov, prolific and influential science fiction writer of that era but whose writings are still very popular today, must have had some concerns as well when it came to potential threats posed by "intelligent machines".  Asimov had a proposition.  Before we get to that, it was two decades earlier than 1940, when the word robot came into the English lexicon.

In 1920 a Czech playwright, Karel Capek, wrote a play that was later translated into English, "Rossum's Universal Robots" - where the word robot  came from Czech, "robotnik", that meant forced worker, where "robota" was forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery, etc. In 1923, a robot was defined as a mechanical person, or person whose work or activities were entirely mechanical.

Asimov, perhaps already concerned about the so called mechanical persons, proposed the "Three Laws of Robotics" :

1st:  A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2nd: A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3rd: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law

Asimov's idea, though nobly well-intentioned to safeguard humanity, was naïvely conceived, given man's proclivity to misuse technology. You see, from the moment our ancestors emerged from the stone age, into Bronze and Iron ages, tools developed to improve hunting and gathering soon evolved into killing implements - first among neighboring tribes, then by hordes for conquest and domination. Alfred Nobel saw TNT go well beyond mining and road building into mass killing of people and destruction of territories.  We have, in other words, always managed to misuse everything, Nobel Prizes or not.

Well, what do we have now?  As in the movie, "Colossus", and many other stories written  to serve as warnings, we are again faced with a situation that seems to be well past contemplation of a dilemma. It is Pandora's box laid bare. It seems that the old suggestion that we can "always pull the plug" is no longer humorous. But, is it really that dire?

A.I., which we treat as if it is an individual entity, is so much more than one single object that we can segregate, separate and excise.  The call to pause further developing  it for some definite period of time until we can create more safeguards as proposed by Musk and all the other high tech luminaries seems like a fool's errand against the backdrop of so many variables, such as, other sectors (nations, companies, individual developers, etc.) not heeding the moratorium for one and many reasons that are likely to be mostly self serving.  

As had always been the case with anything that accompanied humanity in its journey through time, the road we've taken is littered with good ideas and good intentions only to splinter into the inevitable "good, bad and ugly" faces that we as a society always resigned to accept. 

A.I., in my opinion, is not the problem. We are the problem. And there are countless examples. It will require a book just to list them.  But let's take just one that recently happened that is stoking our fears about this one splinter that is eerily scary.

I marvel at the technology of speech translation that used to be only a figment of the creators of Star Trek.  Today, I can talk in English and my Pixel phone will translate it into spoken Filipino instantaneously with a voice of a Filipina perfectly enunciating the words with the proper modulation as if spoken by someone in Manila with perfect grammar. Pixel  will do it in reverse by translating spoken Filipino to English with nary a time lag, and again with perfect grammar.     

That is one awesome A.I. that is doing it.  Good, but here comes the ugly part. In a kidnapping for ransom scam, a mother received a phone call demanding money for her daughter held captive. What she heard when the kidnappers purportedly had her daughter speak on the phone was her daughter's voice crying and pleading for help. The scammers had cloned and mimicked the voice of their daughter via an A.I. program. 

A.I. obviously was not the problem. We can go back to the beginning of civilization whenever that was that we are told A.I. could destroy.  Pick an era. Pick a timeline. Algorithm that is the lifeblood of all A.I. has been around for centuries. Whether it was a simple algorithm on paper or on a sophisticated computer program, A.I. uses algorithms and it does it well once we allow the process to  manipulate data to achieve what is intelligibly useful that among other things can operate robots at the assembly line flawlessly and not take coffee or bathroom breaks.

So, if A.I. is the constant, the variable is us. It is no different from employing a laser to make precise measurements, or cut cleanly through metal, and then we turn around and use it to guide a smart bomb to kill and destroy. Need I say more?

A.I. is not a moral entity.  We are.  A.I. can be programmed to lie, manipulate information and spread it with the speed of summer lightning but it does not care why.  We do. But then some of us don't. 

A.I. does not need any pause.  We need to pause for just a moment to look at ourselves before we start blaming A.I. Allegorically, it was Dr. Frankenstein who created the monster, yet our fear was directed at the latter. 

So, Mr. Musk, "Ought we not be looking in a mirror and see if it is us who might conceivably put an end to civilization?" 

Or, perhaps, instead of lamenting over artificial intelligence, we redirect our focus towards a far more Superior Intelligence that had been around since the beginning of the universe.  Perhaps, S.I. instead of A.I. is what we need to assuage us of the sum of all our fears.

The Many Faces of "If"

"If" - the two letter, one syllable conjunction in the English language has hidden superpowers.  It gives anyone  who uses it  the ability to dream, to be hopeful, to justify, to explain, to create innumerable scenarios of what can happen given a set of "ifs", etc. Yet it is also a tool of the defensive mind.  Add the adjective "only" after it and the power to justify or blame anything is limitless.  At home, at work, among our friends, in relationships, even in math and the sciences, "If" is one conjunction we can't seem to live without. There is a lot there to chew.  But bear with me because perhaps you may not be aware that you've used it often in more ways  than you think.

First, the hopeful face of "If".  In 1965, Sammy Davis, Jr., already a music icon of that and the following decade, sang this song.  The first line of the lyric in the first stanza was actually the title of the song - "If I Ruled The World".

"If I ruled the world

Every day would be the first day of Spring

Every heart would have a new song to sing

And we'd sing of the joy every morning would bring"

(Worth checking in YouTube or any music medium). "If" is indeed capable of  one such powerfully hopeful message.  

Then there is the wishful side of "If" by anyone wanting or needful of a little bit or  for a lot of fortune through some supernatural fashion or, alternatively, via the winning Powerball ticket. One such yearning is exemplified by Tevye - the main character in the Broadway musical, "Fiddler on the Roof",  who sang what  was really a simple wishful song but it was what Tevye said by way of a prelude to it   that captured the audiences' sentiments. 

TEVYE spoke,

"Oh Lord, you made many, many poor people. I realize, of course, that it's no shame to be poor, but it's no great honor either. So, what would have been so terrible if I had a small fortune?"

Then he went on to sing and dance to: "If I were a Rich Man" 

There is one dark side of the superpower of "If" that resides among those who go through life cloaked in guilt-woven garments of, "If only I heeded the advice of so-and-so; if only I had picked a different career; If only I had married someone else; If only I had saved a little bit more; If only .. "If only", in fact, is so powerful when left unsupervised to roam along the irrelevant corridors of our past. Such an exercise in futility is like running backwards on the treadmill. Try imagining that for a moment.  Clearly, it is pointless, yet, somehow, we would catch ourselves back pedaling on that treadmill of the impossible. In such a context "If only" can be one unnecessary burden that is best left by the road side of life.

The other option is when we add the interrogative, "What", before it, and we get:

"What if" when projected throughout the present moment or into the future may actually offer potentially better results; although it may present certain trapdoors if we are not careful.  But with certainty, it will lead to an almost infinite number of doorways.

Take, for example, the expression, x=2(y). What if we assign a value y=3? Then we get x=6.  You see, there is an infinite number of values we can assign to y that changes the value of x. "What if" is indeed a powerful tool.

Soon, we realize the power of "What If" when we are now talking about the future of a young person in search of his or her ability to fulfil a dream, pursue an ambition, or just simply bridge the gap between rough humble beginnings and a fair even path in the journey through life. {What if we give the maximum amount of opportunity to every child to develop what they excel in?} And what about assigning "what if" potentials to a start up business? Indeed there is limitless power of "What If" towards the future but care must be taken that it is not used backwards towards the past.

For the world that it is today, soaked in turmoil and suffering, let's go to  the penultimate stanza of what Sammy Davis, Jr. sang then in 1965. By the way, the original song was in a stage musical in 1963 that was based on a Charles Dicken's story. The character in the play, Samuel Pickwick, was mistaken for a candidate and was urged by the crowd to state his agenda. He rendered his response  by way of the song. We know Charles Dickens' propensity for social and moral context in his writings, so it is not a stretch to assume that the song is an answer to a plea for intervention by a Supreme Being - God, if you will - to put order to what seemed then and now as a very dis-ordered world.

"If I ruled the world

Every man would say the world was his friend

There'd be happiness that no man could end

No my friend, not if I ruled the world".

I leave it to the reader who is looking for answers to what seem today like a world with so many unanswerable questions, to ponder.