Author Archives: Almost

Nobody hates capitalism

Many people think they hate capitalism – while, in fact, they hate corporatism. This misunderstanding is why we can’t have nice things. If everyone understood what capitalism actually is, they would endorse it, and we would all be much better off.

Capitalism only means respect of private property and maximal freedom (and minimal state interference), which allows people to fully pursue their goals and be effective doing it.

Corporatism (which they call capitalism) is very different and hating it is not an exclusive domain of communists and anarchists. Pretty much everyone, including libertarians, hates it. It is characterized by powerful corporations or other entities having a strong grip on the state, using its power (regulations, wars, etc.) to prevent competition and eventually control everything.

Clearly, it is very different from capitalism. A relevant worry though is, as some claim, that capitalism will always converge into it (similar to communism always ending up an authoritarian totality). This can certainly happen, although the inevitability is questionable. The transition there would require large consolidation of the businesses together with large growth of the state power. Either part can be prevented, theoretically – through maintaining a high level of freedom. Competition (which requires freedom) prevents any business from growing too large, and freedom is an antithesis to a large and powerful state. But whether that is possible is unclear – freedom seems to be fighting a losing battle throughout the world.

Most vocal capitalism haters may not be satisfied by these answers. But if you consider the steps that are needed for this transition, it is what you get with communism right away. A powerful state, and a few people controlling everything. Only instead of a few CEO’s and politicians, it is the top party officials. In other words, if transitioning from capitalism to corporatism is like slowly sinking into a swamp, introducing communism is like jumping straight legs into a cesspool.

Why is socialism so popular?

Three words: lack of imagination.

People want to feel that they have control over their lives. Naturally. Decreasing chaos and increasing our power of prediction is a critical heuristic for survival. Feeling like we are in control, that we understand the world and what is coming, is what we are conditioned for. The political system is a wrapper around our living conditions. If we don’t understand the system, if we don’t see how we will be safe and fed tomorrow under it, we become anxious.

This is where imagination comes in. It is very easy to imagine how the political system works if it is centrally managed. There is one (or a few) people who make the right decisions for our benefit and things happen that way. Clear, simple, and anyone can follow.

Imagine, instead, a system that is decentralized. A system where there is no system. People are not told what to do – they make their choices freely, they interact and create freely. Chaos. And out of that chaos order emerges in which things work just the right way for everyone to have what they need. Can you imagine that? Maybe you do and maybe you don’t. Either way, it is really not easy and I can’t do it myself. But my imagination is sufficient for me to believe that it would work. Unfortunately, I, and other such people, are the minority. The majority lacks the required imagination which makes them distrustful of such a system – and understandably so. They instead choose a system that they can imagine and understand, and that is socialism.

Thinking without language

Once upon a time, my girlfriend, who studied Czech language and literature, told me what they learned in school that day. She said that thinking is only possible through language. To me that was most ridiculous but it gave me the idea that some people might believe that. What I found since that day years ago is that apparently there are many of such people, majority in fact. And I always knew they were wrong. The first piece of evidence is what I replied to my girlfriend with. “If a person is raised by wolves, not ever learning any language, they will still be intelligent and able to perform complicated tasks, to imagine things or to plan etc. Do you claim that the person does not think?”

This question is not new and has been, in various ways, answered by others. A direction similar to my wolf question has been investigated by neurologists. They examine people with damage in brain centers connected to language and their subsequent ability to solve tasks that require thinking. A nice example is the composer Vissarion Shebalin who was still able to compose music after completely losing the ability to produce or understand language. Another branch of research examines societies with different language structures and the correlation to their abilities. In short, the results are that some thinking is possible, and language does affect it. 

The approach I will take here is different and has two components. One part is a description of my own thinking processes which appears to be unusually transparent. A single, subjective case of course does not prove anything. But a big part of it is reproducible, or at least serves as an inspiration and navigation for the second part, which, drawing its language from epistemology, is describing a specific view on thinking and its relationship to language and the real world. As a first step I will start with a more systematic description of the problem.

A more exact formulation of the issue revolves around concepts. Concepts are the building blocks of our thinking. They represent entities and ideas around us, both concrete and abstract. A concept of a chair is what, in our heads, represents all the chairs in the world. Abstract concepts then represent ideas without a physical representation, such as heroism. The problematic of concepts is a part of epistemology, a branch of philosophy, which looks at how we attain, process and use knowledge. In short – how we know. Concepts are the core part of it because they are the building blocks of our knowledge. Typical questions that revolve around them are – what are the limits of one concept? Is it still a chair if it does not have the back and misses two legs? How do we create a concept (one thing people do agree on is that we are not born with them)? How are the concepts structured and relate to one another? All these questions are important, and at this point solved to a pretty good degree. A controversial one is “Are they real?”. Clearly they are not, they are just an ability of our minds created by evolution for dealing with reality. But many people relate them to “essence” (mainly introduced by Greeks and popular to this day), which also is not real, but has strong religious charge, and therefore a strong foothold in mysticism and among its many irrational proponents. 

The last question, which is the subject of this essay, is ”can concepts exist without language?”. As I see it, this question is not important – for the same reasons as why my answer is “yes”. It is just too trivial. But while the question is not important, answering it apparently is, because so many people think it is impossible. For me that is even more striking because it is not only the historical philosophers and some prominent modern ones like Wittgenstein or Russel. But even the objectivist philosophy is on boat with what is, to my knowledge, the majority – and I find objectivists to be right about more things than any other philosophies that I know of (but still is far from being right about everything)

The basic idea behind the generally accepted view is this. People, when born, start with no concepts. But as they learn, they distinguish new separate objects and ideas and formulate concepts for them in their head. A new concept first goes through a creation phase. It starts as some hazy idea that is gradually refined (in some way, the model of which differs by philosophical school) into a “final” form by giving it properties that specify it and distinguishing it from other concepts. At some point during the process the new concept is given a name drawn from the language (e.g. a “chair”). That name becomes its unique handle which is necessary to use the concept – to store it as its own thing, to recover it, identify, to be clear that it is this concept and not another. And also to communicate it – which is irrelevant for the question in question, but in fact (I mean in my view) that is the only reason why language is needed in regard to concepts. Without a language label, they say, the new concept could not be stored in the mind and used. Language is, therefore, necessary for concepts and in consequence for any thinking, since it works over them.

The reason I disagree comes primarily from my own experience – but anyone can see it if they look in the right places, as I will show. 
I was quite young when I started practicing meditation, the core of which was calming the mind down. The most “noisy” part was the thinking in words – thinking as if leading a conversation with myself. I was learning to suppress it, while still thinking and progressing through the meditation. With some effort, the thought processes were there, but the words were not. Another piece of the puzzle came in high school when a friend of mine was surprised that I think in such an inefficient way – using words – at which moment I found I am only scratching the surface. My “loud” thinking remained to this day. But not much later I came up with another idea. To perform (simple) arithmetics in my head without words, but rather using intuition. Start with the assignment, say 12×7. But to not go through the calculation explicitly as usual (“saying“ out the calculation steps, or imagining them written), but relax, turn off the head (as in the meditation), and let the result come. It worked rather well. I have never extended it to practical use but it was a nice proof of concept. Neither of these proves my point that thinking can be done without words, but they were my stepping stones.

A more tangible progress came with higher and more abstract mathematics. The common way to deal with it is using formulas, but that did not work well for my brain. Instead I imagined the mathematical bodies (usually some weird sets) and their interactions as some fuzzy objects in space. They did not possess any conventional names or concepts, they were new temporary entities I have created to deal with them.

Over time I have adopted these thinking frameworks into my everyday life. I still usually think in words, but a lot of the time, or rather with non-trivial problems, I use something else. I call it raw concepts. Remember how I described the creation of concepts – the intermediary fuzzy object that gets a name assigned when it is finished? The traditional view makes it look like after giving it the name, it ceases to exist. But It never went anywhere. Not the label, but that fuzzy thing is what a concept is. In very exact terms it is a specific pattern of neural excitation, which is different for every different concept. Subjectively for us, it is something in our head that probably everyone would describe differently. It is a “feeling”, a “flavor”, maybe a differently shaped object in our imagination (some people even see colors). And by shaped I don’t mean chair-shaped, but a fuzzy cloud that has this “feeling” or whatever which carries the concepts properties and makes us recognize it for what it is. It is likely that you are not used to perceiving it this way. I am assuming that because if most people did, there would be no question about whether words are necessary in order to think. But the reason people do not see it this way is not that it is not there. It is. But it is covered up by the word labels and images that we have attached to the concepts. When we want to realize a chair, the word “chair” and various chair images shine so bright that it seems that is all that is there. But it is just a shiny wrapping of the feeling pattern, that cloud of neural excitations that really define what the concept is. I can tell because in my mind, I can turn the words off and observe these concept “feelings” in their naked, raw form.

Now that we have the concept of a raw concept, it should seem more obvious how the concepts are formed to begin with. Either a blank raw concept “stem cell” is created, or one is split off an existing concept, inheriting its properties and is shaped through the concept formulation process (which I have not described, see “How we know” by Harry Binswanger for a good theory) into its new form. That gets labeled (although we might start with the label already – “Mom, what is a “chair”?”) and stored. The label, the word of language, is just that, a label. The label is not the concept and the label is by no means necessary for the concept to be created or to exist.

Are you still not convinced? Let me give you a more familiar example. Remember those times you wanted to recall some word and you could not? When you have the word on your tongue, when the “feeling” of that word is there in your head, bright and clear, but the word itself doesn’t want to come out? There it is. Your raw concept without a label. You knew it all along.

Another piece of evidence, and I would say even more serious, comes from the way the thinking itself works. Or perhaps with how it doesn’t. I am not sure if anyone thinks this – but in order to clearly dispel this idea – the core of thinking is not performed by language. Language and sentences can be used, yes. But that only works for simple, well defined problems, and is highly inefficient and limited by the speed we can formulate those sentences. A good use case is going over a shopping list in our head – it is simple, linear, and needs to be precise. But it can hardly work for anything complicated if it does not work even for simple, well structured problems like chess, or unintelligent physical activities. Imagine a chess player running through hundreds of moves per minute, thinking out loud “Ok this piece moves to this position, and then that piece over there to that position” where “this” and “that” should actually also have specific descriptions… Or trying to catch a ball, calculating its trajectory, movements of the body needed in order to catch it, while considering how heavy the ball is and if it could hurt you – and doing all that using sentences that precisely describe every bit of it? Well, clearly that is not how thinking really works. Again, these sentences are only labels put on the thinking in case we want to keep a very clear track of it or to communicate it. The way thinking really works is again through these raw concepts – and their brain excitation patterns. They are there, they change forms on the go as needed, they mix, interact, merge, split… They form new excitation patterns, often intermediary ones that have no label and never will, until a state is reached where the configuration of the patterns contain an answer we were looking for. So for instance, we conjure the raw concepts of a ball (most relevantly its physical properties that we know), laws of physics, a model of our body and its physics, we let those models interact in a simulation and plan the best way to move in order to catch the ball. This comes as quite intuitive. Is this anyhow different from pondering the development of ethics in the life of a novel character? In principle, no. It is still a manipulation of some models consisting of concepts and their relations and interactions. The reason it seems different is that catching a ball is really automatic and intuitive for us, while ethical considerations are an unknown territory that requires a clear, conscious focus. But the inner mindworks are the same.

As for me, I can observe this concept interaction in my mind directly. I can see the fuzzy raw concepts in the 3d space, moving, interacting and mixing in many ways and points, simultaneously creating new flavors. Sometimes those flavors “click” into something that seems to make sense and to be useful, which I can then lock as a next step in the thinking and move on.

To be clear, this whole thing is not trying to say that language is not useful for thinking. I am only saying that it is not necessary – in theory, and some, but not all, practical applications. Language is very helpful for its labeling function as well as putting thoughts and thought processes into clear boxes, which make the thinking process clear, well organized, and manageable even for complex problems. Another aspect that plays a practical role is that the hardware of our brains is already developed by evolution with the expectation of using a language. Now this is my speculation. Because of this wiring, thinking without language is more difficult for us than if we did not have the language ability to begin with. Some brain pathways are so optimized and dependent on language that it makes not using it more difficult, and for some people impossible.

On the other hand – and this is just a side note for perspective – there are people whose beliefs point in an entirely opposite direction. Not only do they see the usage of language as problematic, but they view even the very foundations that we have laid out here – concepts – as the enemy of true “thinking”. It is the Zen Buddhists. Let me present their idea with a famous koan.

Shuzan held out his short staff and said:
“If you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality. If you do not call it a short staff, you ignore the fact.
Now what do you wish to call this?”

The second part of the master’s statement is already trivial for us. The “fact” he mentions is that the language label “short staff” does indeed belong to the item he is holding. But what does the “opposing reality” in the first part mean? The Zen Budhists teach that the world is not words, or concepts, or even objects. The world just is as it is. Boxing it up into categories and labeling it prevents us from seeing it for what it really is. Assigning even “identical” items, like two same looking chairs, a common concept means forgetting their individuality. The short staff Shuzan holds is simple, and yet very complex. It is an object (here he does not go as far as to deny even the “object” property in order to not confuse the students too much), with its material, shape, temperature, the way light reflects on it, its trajectory through history and into the future and much more. Saying that the object is a “short staff” (assigning it the label or the short staff concept under it) would leave out all of these critical individual properties, and deny its true reality.

As we know from physics, they are technically right. The world is a continuous space that is filled with different kinds of particles. There is no “water” or a “rock”. A rock is just particles of one kind that are dense in the area that in some region happen to change to another kind of particles, perhaps of water. While they look different to us, on the fundamental level the difference is unimportant. It is only in our brains that we cut this continuous space into pieces and give those pieces names and categories. These categories (or concepts, or essences) are not a fundamental part of the universe. As I wrote earlier – they are only a virtual tool imagined in our brains and created by evolution to deal with the world and to survive. The lesson given to us by Zen is that when we start on the path of discovering the core of our minds, dropping the language to reach pure concepts is only a first step and we can go much further.

To summarize my idea – the question whether language is necessary in order to think seems ridiculous to me and I hope I have presented enough evidence for why I see it that way. Now it is up to your introspection and imagination. But even if you cannot at all directly observe it as I do (which I think is the normal way and my brain is just broken), the model I have described should still make more sense than the clumsy language one and present a foundation for further research.

The definition of intelligence

When reading AI papers I keep running into definitions of intelligence. Two researchers – Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter – even made a nice effort and put together a collection of them [1]. I don’t know how about you, but I keep finding them unsatisfactory. Apparently, a popular and widely accepted one nowadays is

“Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments”

by Legg and Hutter (L&H) [1,2]. It sounds ok and yet – do you feel any closer to understanding what intelligence is after seeing it?

Intelligence definitions suffer from various common maladies. Putting aside that many people just don’t understand what intelligence is, there are two main reasons for their inaccuracy. One reason is a bias towards circumstances. The authors are not trying to be accurate, but instead they are tailoring their definition to their specific needs. Others (perhaps unknowingly) conform to whatever the opinion of the public or scientific community, or research direction, is. In other words, there is a divide between what intelligence is, and what people expect it to be.

The other issue is a prevalent logical inaccuracy. Generally, a proper definition needs to have two main properties: to completely cover what we want to describe, but also exclude everything else (the third property being that it is simple). But with the existing definitions that is, to my knowledge, never the case.

Many describe intelligence too explicitly, in too much detail and using examples. That is especially common for the older ones and ones done by psychologists (who are rather practical and human oriented than formally accurate). One example, picked at random from the collection:

“the general mental ability involved in calculating, reasoning, perceiving relationships and analogies, learning quickly, storing and retrieving information, using language fluently, classifying, generalizing, and adjusting to new situations.” Columbia Encyclopedia, sixth edition, 2006

The result is a definition that is perhaps good for uninitiated readers, but is too constricted to describe all that we want to understand as intelligence. For our needs it does not suffice to describe human intelligence – we are dealing with prospects of future AI’s and perhaps also extra-terrestrial ones. So we need to define it even more broadly than we need right now.

On the other side, many intelligence definitions suffer from being too loose and including too much. A good example is a definition by Minsky:

“Intelligence is the ability to solve hard problems”.

It indeed is. But there are other things too that can solve hard problems. Like a pneumatic hammer. Or a brute force state search. Are those intelligent? No and not much.

What are we trying to define?

There is a lot of confusion about what intelligence is, and what level of it is enough to call something intelligent. This stems from the fact that different people have different subjective experience, expectations and applications for it, and nobody has properly defined the intelligence itself yet. What matters for most people is human intelligence and how to compare it between people. Some are trying to find where on the scale animals end and humans are. Others are working with AI, which works quite differently, while, on the applied side of the research, is still being compared on the same scale and the limit of what already is intelligent and what is not is attempted to be specified – without much success due to insufficient understanding. There is this funny property – “When it starts to work, we don’t call it AI anymore” (this is often quoted but I can’t find an attribution). The theoretical scientists and philosophers are attempting to find a clear and generic definition free of all the clutter.

The point here is that there are very different expectations and applications to match – both theoretical and practical. Different people want different aspects of intelligence to be emphasized and detailed while others can (or should) be kept simple or omitted. Therefore it would be a mistake to try to fit one definition on them all and attempting to do that is one of the reasons why past researchers have failed.

What I propose is, instead of writing one definition, creating a framework with a simple core that can be extended for the specific needs.

Before presenting it, I will first show how the definitions are constructed (and pinpoint some errors) which will lay foundations to the new framework.

Modularity

Nowadays enough research has been done and enough terms defined that making a proper definition is not an artistic endeavor anymore but rather a mechanical work of grabbing available pieces and plugging them into a frame to achieve the desired outcome. I will demonstrate this on decomposition of the contemporary definition so that it is more clear later.

“Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments”.

1) “Intelligence” – the subject, necessary.

2) “measures” –  “is” is commonly used too. “Measures” stresses that it is a measure, therefore a range and something that can be measured.

3) “ability” – it is a property of something and it enables something.

4) “to achieve goals” – it has a target, as opposed to properties that just exist without any direction at all. Note that this is not sufficient for purposefulness. Evolution has a goal (gene spreading) but it does not reason and has no purpose. I think that having a purpose is not necessary for intelligence though.

5) “agent’s” – intelligence is a property of something that has agency, acts. Not strictly necessary, but without agency  the intelligence would be inconsequential.

6) “in a wide range of environments” – this is the main contribution of the authors and the meat of the definition. The authors believe that this is a sufficient prerequisite for intelligence as it implies a wide (… full) range of intelligent abilities. To quote from [2]:

“Reasoning,  planning,  solving  problems,  abstract  thinking,  learning  from  experience and so on, these are all mental abilities that allow us to successfully achieve goals. If we were missing any one of these capacities, we would clearly be less able to successfully deal with such a wide range of environments. Thus, these capacities are  implicit  in  our  definition  also.”

True. But so does having legs or a lot of money. While the success in a wide range of environments is a good addition to intelligence, it does not define intelligence. It only defines versatility. To me it seems that the reason why this definition came to existence and got popularity is the current research which is trying to shake off the disappointment of AI’s that were supposed to be the end game but instead turned out to be “narrow” and useless for anything but their specific application. Therefore the focus today is on “general” AI, which is exactly what this definition aims at. So while it looks great by being very general and simple, by being too general it violates the second property of a good definition and fails to define intelligence. Which, after all, the authors admit themselves in the end. “We simply do not care whether the agent is efficient, due to some very clever algorithm,or absurdly inefficient, for example by using an unfeasibly gigantic look-up table of precomputed  answers.  The  important  point  for  us  is  that  the  machine  has  an amazing   ability   to   solve   a   huge   range   of   problems   in   a   wide   variety   of environments.”

The definition

What I propose is one core definition of intelligence and then an array of optional extensions to satisfy the specific needs and use cases. The core does not contain anything it does not have to, it is as simple as possible and to the point.

“Intelligence is an ability to process information.”

It intentionally does not say who has the ability, to what end, or to what degree. Because those are already various measures and properties of intelligence that are not necessary to define it. Does this define intelligence? It seems too simple and perhaps counterintuitive. But that is because of the framing we are used to from our perspective in which people are intelligent and chess programs are not. But we need to take more than one step back in order to see the whole picture.

The reason for emphasis on information is that it is exactly what separates “thinking” and “intelligence” from the manipulation of physical objects. Brains are intelligent, hammers are not. Even calculators are intelligent, just to a very trivial degree.

As far as I can say, the definition can’t be made more simple than it is without completely breaking it. So the question rather is whether anything that is necessary for intelligence definition is missing. I have already addressed many such components, such as the agency or goal, but I would like to mention a couple more.

It is tempting to say “ability to process and utilize information”, but even using the information already falls on the “interface” of the intelligence. If you imagine the intelligence as something that is happening inside a box, taking inputs, doing the “processing” and giving outputs, the usage of the information means using the results of the processing and already falls in the space outside the box, or on its border.

The most striking deficiency is that there is absolutely no indication of a measure of the intelligence. I think that it stems from our expectations. We hear about intelligence a lot and almost never think about the intelligence itself, but instead automatically go a step further and are interested in measuring and comparing it. But measuring the magnitude of something is a different topic than its definition. A very important topic certainly! But it is a very complex one that I will not attempt to address – many researchers, including Leg and Hutter, are working on it and making nice progress (by the way, their definition correctly does not address the magnitude either). A related question though is how useful a definition is as a foundation towards being able to measure intelligence. If we could choose between two equally powerful definitions, then the more practical one would be better. But right now the main thing to get at least one definition right – the practical considerations are the next step. I would say mine is as good as any and its design towards modular extensibility is already a step towards practical applications.

As for the optional addons, here are some examples.

  • Agent’s … – if we want to emphasize what our research aims at
  • (an ability to) achieve goals through (the processing…) – to say that we are trying to use the intelligence to solve something
  • Complex (processing) – To emphasize that certain degree of intelligence is necessary in order to call it intelligent
  • … namely calculating, reasoning, perceiving relationships and analogies, learning quickly, storing and retrieving information, using language fluently, classifying, generalizing, and adjusting to new situations. – to tailor it to people
  • … in a wide range of environments – to emphasize we are looking for versatility and to distance from narrow intelligence

As you can imagine, you can create quite anything, including the L&H definition. With the caveat of including the information processing clause – lack of which was my motivation for this paper in the first place. Intelligence is about information, so let’s go from there.

[1] The ultimate definition of intelligence, Shane Legg & Marcus Hutter, 2007, https://arxiv.org/abs/0706.3639

[2] Universal Intelligence: A Definition of Machine Intelligence, Legg & Hutter, 2006, https://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs671/12f/12f-papers/legg+hutter-universal.pdf

Fair reward – merit or effort?

For us, responsible people, it is clear that just and fair is to be rewarded accordingly to our contribution. If we try harder, work more and better and create more value as a result, we expect to get more in return. And accordingly, if we don’t try or we do a lousy job for whatever reason, we understand that we deserve less for it. An abominable contrast to it is the altruistic system that commands that we shall not ask more for doing a good job. In fact we shall not ask for any rewards at all. The rewards go to those in need, regardless of their contribution or how deserving they are. This system is fundamentally unjust.

While this is clear, many people hold a different view that leads to a very common conflict – and not only among philosophers. A typical objection I keep hearing is the following:

Different people have different opportunities that they cannot affect. Why should that make some people better off than others? Imagine two identical children. One is born into a rich family that provides it with good education and raises it to be confident and successful. The other’s parents are poor and abusive, the child receives little education and grows up to be a nerve-wreck. Both of them start to work and put equal effort into it, doing the best they can. Is it fair that the first receives vastly higher wage and acclaim?
The person telling you this believes that it is fair to reward people according to their effort and not the actual value their work creates.

I have to admit that this does make sense in a way. In line of the ethics we started off with, a person should be rewarded based on what they do. So why should a person be punished or rewarded based on things that are not in their power to change? Rewarding people based on their effort indeed is fair as well. Another perspective comes from the negative side. While I abhor the idea of a poor lazy person getting someone else’s money in welfare, I similarly dislike it when an arrogant moron makes a lot of money just because he was born with a golden spoon in his mouth. Formally, he may create a lot of value, but only a tiny fraction of it can be really credited to him. I find them both undeserving.

How can that be? How can there be two conflicting definitions of a just reward at the same time?
As always – “Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises”.
Hint comes when you need to give an answer to the person with their heartbreaking children story. Maybe you have a better one but the best answer I can come up with is – “The world is not fair. It sometimes sucks, but we just have to live the life the best we can with the cards we are dealt.” Which is a lousy answer when trying to explain what fair means.

The reason is that these two cases of justice, while talking about the same thing, are based in different worlds.
Those different starting conditions that our objector complained about are based in the real world. It is the reality we all live in, which is without values or feelings. It deals to everybody, everyday, something different, and there is no fairness in it whatsoever. It is what it is.
On the other hand, the justice we wanted originally applies on a higher, abstract level – on the level of us humans and our ethics. It is the level where values do exist and the one that we can choose and change. So while the conditions each of us is given are unfair, we can create fairness in how we interact.

While this explains how two seemingly colliding definitions of fairness can coexist, it does not say how to deal with the violation of the later. Unfortunately, dealing with unfair conditions is an open problem and previous attempts to solve it have led to some top-tier catastrophes. Formally, the statement of both is quite clear. But the practicality of their solutions differ widely.
The problem is that the amount of “value” we can distribute is limited. We only have as much as we create. Value can’t be drawn out of thin air – regardless politicians often saying otherwise.
Giving a fair reward proportionally to the value created is straightforward. It just means exchanging value for value in a corresponding manner. Value created is distributed back proportionally and without significant issues. So the overall vision that 1) the world is not fair, deal with it; 2) but reward everybody according to their contribution – is simple, clear, consistent, and easy to implement.
On the other hand, trying to fix the unfairness of the world itself and reward people according to their effort is impractical. There is no way to objectively assess an effort a person is making. If somebody creates something of value to you, you don’t need to care how and why they did it – the value, for you, is objective. But knowing how hard they tried? Was it an incapable person doing their best, or a very capable one but slacking, or a one specializing in the skill of acting out a hard effort?
While we can make a personal call and pay extra to a person we know to be good and honest and trying hard even though they did not do so much at the end, this can’t practically be extended to a large scale. Any attempt to do so inevitably fails on the subjective nature of an effort. Moreover, since it can’t be correctly assessed, it only creates wrong incentives for people – to pretend to try, instead of doing actual good work – destroying value for everybody as a result.

“World is not fair” is a poor answer, but currently the best we have. Trying to fix that, on a global scale, should be done with utmost caution as such attempts have already cost hundreds of millions of lives. Until somebody figures something out (naive wishful thinking really does not count), we should stay content with playing the cards we were dealt and the rewards we deserve. Which is not that bad.

Attraction, cheating and jealousy explained

Romantic relationships are an important area of our lives that we are all familiar with. And yet there are many aspects surrounding it that are confusing, or do not make any sense at all. Why does virtually everybody cheat on their partners when it clearly should not be worth it? Why do women go after rich guys that don’t respect them and men pursue nearly any girl they see?

All can be clarified if approached systematically and from its logical foundations, instead of the usual point of view. Traditionally it is being analyzed either through our very subjective experience or common knowledge that is heavily burdened by cultural traditions.

This overview starts only from trivial axioms that are the foundation of any life and just the basic biological difference between men and women (yes, they do exist). From there, through logical steps, comparing them from the men’s and women’s perspectives, it builds up all the way to our real life issues.

Before I start, I would like to clarify a few points to avoid some common misconceptions.

The first point is that there is a major divide within our minds. Large part of what is happening inside us and what is running our decisions are hard-wired, genetically preprogrammed instincts. The other part of us is our aware consciousness – the part that we perceive as “us”. The conscious part of our minds believes that it itself is the only decision maker, while in fact is mostly doing the bidding of the unconscious instincts. That is all fine as long as we are aware of it. From my experience, some people are aware, and some people are not at all. But more importantly, many refuse that notion as it requires accepting that we do not have as much control as we would like to believe we have.
This article taps a lot into the hard wired areas of us and so at least accepting the possibility of it is a necessary requirement for understanding it.

Another important point is the effect of culture, which is very strong, but relatively short. We evolved over millions of years under some, rather stable, conditions. Only over the last couple thousand years the conditions started to change drastically by emergence of larger and larger societies and their cultures. Even more drastic changes are brought by technologies in recent history, the timespan of which is basically nothing in comparison. The way the world as we know it looks like and what we take for granted is one thing. What conditions we are hard-wired for is quite another. These two origins of our conditioning are often clashing drastically, which we have all experienced.

A striking example is contraception. Technically, it is a game changer. We can now have sex with anyone without having children from it. Technically, cheating should be totally fine as a result. That may be true, to some degree, on the level of reason. But reason can hardly change how we feel about things and contraception was not around when our instincts, and the ensuing emotions, evolved. This article taps a lot into the hard wired areas of us and so at least accepting the possibility of it is a necessary requirement for understanding it.

In short – if during reading you find something outrageous or plain stupid, please, try to recall those two points above which may help you see it in a new light.

This article taps into the hard wired areas of us a lot so at least accepting the possibility of it is a necessary requirement for understanding it.

So let’s get started. Throughout the whole table, men’s side is on the left, women’s on the right.

MenWomen
The main axiom: the main goal of all living things is to spread their genes (that means also similar genes)
That is how nature made us and it is shared by all of life.
Reason is that anything alive that did not try their best to spread got extinct. Only those who tried their hardest made it through billions of years of evolution to this day.
Strategies for spreading of genes
There are 4 main ways to do it:

1. Make children in large number (quantity)

2. Make children with good genes = high ability to spread their own genes (quality)
Children only help spread our genes as much as they spread themselves.

3. Raise and support one’s own offspring, increasing their chances (care)

4. Support other individuals with similar genes
The more similar the better – that is why we prefer to help (even sacrifice for) close family over distant family, our country to another one, human species over kettle.
No. 1 and 2 are the most effective, no. 3 varies, no. 4 is out of our scope now.
What does it take to do no. 1 – make a child?
Few enjoyable minutesFew sometimes enjoyable minutes + about two years of pregnancy and feeding + lot of nutrients + large chance of death
What are the costs of no. 2 – finding a partner with good genes?
This is complicated and differs in time and culture. But both women and men compete for the best partners (in entirely different ways) and in the end the total effort is comparable.
What are the costs of no. 3 – supporting a child
About the same and quite high for either, BUT
Does not know the child is his.
Making the effort less appealing 		Knows 100% the child is hers.
What is the potential in no. 1 – quantity
Virtually unlimited~10
What is the potential in no. 2 – quality
About the same. Offspring gender is random and both can choose partners.
What is the potential in no. 3 – care
Stronger in protection/providingNecessary in first x months of life
This difference in care approach is unimportant right now. Both parents are important for a child’s survival. But effectively the cost is higher for a man as the child does not need to be his.
The more certain he is of his parenthood, the more worthwhile the effort is. The ratio of children by another man is not well known and estimates are between 4% and 30%.
So what is the most effective strategy?
No. 1 – Quantity
Because it is just so easy.

So easy that only going around and having sex, never caring what happens to the woman/child is an effective strategy. Even if 9/10 die, he can still have many children. Raising a child is only a second option.
Note that efficient does not mean easy. Only few men are able to do this successfully. 		No. 2 – Quality + No. 3 – raising
Because of the cost and no. 1 is not an option.

Having a child is extremely expensive and dangerous. Therefore big investment into choosing the sex partner with good genes is worthwhile, and so is an effort of any size to keep the child alive and well.
Choosing a partner
What partner to choose?
There are in fact two kinds of partners. One for sex, to produce a child with one’s own and the partner’s genes. Other is a long-term partner for living – supporting each other and raising children. As a result, different things are expected of them.
Necessary side note – what are the strengths of the genders?
Equipped for combat, hunting, construction
Generally whatever is needed for survival. Men are not important for reproduction (!), one is enough for whole town. Which is the reason why they are good for combat and hunting – they are expendable.		Can bear children, communication
Ability to bear children is critical for reproduction and fate of any society. Any group can only have so many children (=gene spreading) as they have women.
Communication maintains society.
Why need partner for sex?
To make childrenTo make children and get means
Men have the survival means – offering them a chance to bear a child is a way to get them.
Side note – for complete picture – why to try in life?
To be able to get/provide for women
Only way to have children. This is why men are so competitive not only over women, but over everything. Not winning any woman means a dead end for his genes.		Do not have to try
Only need to find some guy. Men are happy to provide in exchange for the chance to have a child. Women are only competitive over men = their genes and means.
What partner to choose for sex = genes?
Does not matter. The more women the better.

Little cost and much to gain. Why limit oneself?

This is why men would have sex with about anybody.		One that gives the best genes possible.
I.e. making children that will be most successful in spreading further. This is why women go for bad boys – they are shit, but bound to have many children (and may pass that trait to her male offspring). This is why women go for whoever many women want. Because they want their son etc. to also be wanted by many women.
How difficult is it to find a partner to make a child?
Mostly very difficult
Because women go for quality (are picky) and are scarce. Top men got many, others get none in their whole life. Wars are, from a big part, fought over women.		Zero effort, if not picky. High to find the best
Because men go for quantity.
Any effort goes into choosing the best one.
Being “hard to get” and provoking men into competition are some ways to find the best.
Why need partner for living?
To be able to ensure children are his
To be able to have any sex at all
To utilize time between the one-time sexes
To be able to effectively pass on his power and wealth
To maintain the home
Not having one is a viable strategy.		To get safety for herself and children
To get other means
To pass her partner’s power and wealth onto her children
Historically, a woman without man’s protection would die or get kidnapped and her children killed or enslaved.
What partner to choose for living?
One that can bear/raise children
One that can best reassure him that he will be the father of the children and will not waste his efforts.
This is why young age, virginity and chastity are so sought after.		One with the largest means to provide for safety and needs of her and children and to pass the means to the children.
Age is not important. Power is.
A wealthy powerful son is a nuke of gene spreading
So who is attractive?
Attractive is exactly what fulfills the needs above.
Nature programmed us to like that which will help us spread.
Cheating
Today it is mostly called “cheating” (let’s ignore for now that it can be allowed by the partners) and that is what we will focus on from here.
Historically, it often worked differently – men having harems or women being shared by tribes as examples. While these approaches are important in general, the are not for our purposes now.
Why to “cheat” on the long-term (for life) partner?
To have many low effort children
Remember, having sex with as many women as possible is the top strategy for men.		To get the best genes possible for her child.
Her long-term partner is probably (99.9%) not the best guy out there – many women need a partner and few men are at the top. But they can still cheat and give her children the good genes.
What makes the “cheating” bad? How does it harm the long-term partner?
He diverts some of his wealth and attention that could be hers or her children’s.
If things go wrong, he might have to provide for another child.
There is a chance he will change for the other woman. 		Her goal is to bring other man’s child for her long-term partner to take care of, inflicting a significant cost (and a lie) on him.
Good chance to change for a “better” guy if feasible.
What makes the “cheating” ok?
He goes for quantity -> does not want to spend more than he has to. He just goes and comes back and does not want to care.
Since the “quality” is less important, he is less likely to change his partner.		Nothing really
How “bad” is the “cheating” overall?
Somewhat
This is why polygamy is common and why women often overlook the cheating.		Very
This is why, in places, women get executed for cheating. And so are men who cheat with married women.
Why are they jealous?
To find and prevent the negatives outlined above. The jealousy is proportional to the threat – a lot higher for men.
That is why men go and kill the offending man. Not the woman though as he still needs her to make children.

What does this all mean for us?

Things are not pretty. Nature did not program us to be nice and honest and fair, but to do things that hurt our partners and ourselves too, for the sake of spreading our own genes. I am not advocating for any of this nor I like it. But that is a reality that is not going away anytime soon.

Not closing our eyes and being aware of how things work is a good start of dealing with it though.

“Fixing” it

“Fixing” it is very hard. Sure, contraception can wipe out the real consequences. But it can’t change how we feel about it. These instincts are ancient and important and form the roots of who we are. They are behind some of our deepest emotions, such as love, and what we like and dislike. Keep in mind that this article is only an outline and does not capture the whole complexity of the subject, nor the countless ways it connects to other parts of our minds and bodies – affecting everything in our lives. 

I will not try to propose solutions here, but will only give a warning. Trying to “fix” some of it – how we feel – can hardly be done without side effects and can be dangerous. For instance, many people now believe jealousy is wrong and they try to remove it from their personality (so that they can have sex without limits). But I don’t think that can be done without the likely danger of changing and damaging other parts of us, such as the way we love. So try it with caution.

What we can do, on the other hand, safely, are two things. One is to be more understanding of others. While these instincts are often based on bad reasons, people are usually not at all aware of them and just follow their programming. The urge to cheat is no more wrong than jealousy, or love. All exist for the same reason. Having these urges and emotions is not wrong – it is who we are. Whether we act upon them and how is quite another thing. Once aware of our actions and reasons behind them, we get new power and also full responsibility and from there we can call others and ourselves accountable.

Final words

While the article only focuses on sexuality, the outlined differences between genders have much wider implications affecting everything we do. I will not go deeper than I already have. If your only takeaway is that men and women are not the same – as it is popular these days to claim – it will already be a big step towards avoiding very costly mistakes.

Origins of bread queues of communism

It goes about like this.

The (working class) people: “The bread is expensive, them baker exploiters are overpricing it!”

The (communist party) government: “No worries, we are working on it.”

Government: Sends couple bakers to uranium mines and sets official bread price mandatory for everybody to 5x cheaper than before.

People: “Yay! Serves them well. Now we can have the cheap bread we are entitled to.”

Bakers: “Da fuk. It’s impossible to make bread this cheap. We can’t bake it out of thin air. We have to pay the workers, pay for the flour and feed our families!”

Government: “Stop being selfish, help your fellow comrades in need.”

Bakers: “Right. Fuck that, let’s make bread rolls.”

People: “Oy, secret police, them bakers ain’t making our bread!”

Government: Sends more bakers to uranium mines and fixes the prices for all food. “You better have bread next time.“

Bakers: “What can we do, what can we do.” Bake bread as before, but offer just the minimum amount they must at the government price and sell the rest under the counter – black market style.

People: Standing in line from 4am to get the low supply cheap bread. “Finally we have our bread, bless the communist party.”

Bakers: “Wait a minute! Millers! How come you are not doing your part in the plan for better tomorrows? We demand the flour be 5x cheaper too!”

Millers: “Fuck.”

CFS/ME explained by a geek

CFS in short

Chronic fatigue syndrome is a very difficult disease to understand and navigate. With the flu, you just stay under a blanket for two weeks and that’s it. Not the case with CFS though. It seems to be changing form, sometimes improving and other times going right to hell for no reason at all. It can take weeks to months to even assess what effect an external factor (treatment, exercise, diet, …) had. But there is a system under all of that.
It took me over three years to figure it out and now I can share it with you, along with a few recommendations. I only have experience with a rather light form of it, so I am not sure if this would apply to worse cases. But from what I read from others, I don’t see why it would not. In either case, let me know.

Being a geek, I will approach it quite technically – which adds a lot of clarity but maybe also confusion for some people. Imagine it is a computer game (might as well be!) and it should be fine.

Stats to follow

The whole progress of CFS is an interaction of three parameters related to the body – long-term fitness, sickness level, and current fatigue. 

The first two tracks progress, and the third is what runs the game. Their interaction is what it is all about. Don’t mind the missing details now, all will be explained later.

CFS parameters

CFS stats

I) The first one is the overall fitness. Of the three, it is the most stable and changes very slowly. It forms the baseline from which the game is played.

II) The second is the sickness level. It goes from feeling normal (which is about as great as Christmas) to being hardly able to move, braindead, in bed. Most of the time it is somewhere in between – feeling shitty, with a mind fog that makes thinking and concentration pretty difficult, and thinking twice about any kind of activity.

III) The third part is a meter (a queue exactly) of muscle fatigue. Mind exhaustion affects it too, but muscles are what it is mainly about. Any kind of physical exertion adds on top of it, and it slowly empties over time. And there is a marker on the meter, which is really important. Keeping the cumulative fatigue under the mark means things are going fine, while going over leads to a quick and painful relapse.

How it ties together

I)  The fitness sets the top point one returns to after being acutely sick and working back up to a “normal” state. A better overall fitness means more space to navigate through – getting more sick does not need to be so limiting and more activity is possible when getting better again.

You can increase your fitness very slowly by careful measured exercising and only when not sick – which, unfortunately, is the smaller portion of time. The rest of the time it will slowly deteriorate. 

II) The sickness level is not as simple as it may seem. As a general rule, it is hard and slow to improve, but can jump from ok to hell in a snap of the fingers.

 

It has three different stages. There is a sick part, which means simply being more or less sick – feeling shitty, a bee hive in the head, you name it. And trying to do as little as possible in order to get out of it asap – which takes days, weeks, months…

Then there is an intermediate stage – this one is really tricky and a frequent downfall. After a long time of non-activity you finally feel ok, but in fact you are not. You want to start being active again, but the body cannot handle it and plummets right back into the sick state. I still haven’t figured out how to know when this phase is over other than very careful probing and waiting.

Only after succeeding in this patience trial one gets into the good stage where muscles regenerate well enough and exercising and improvement can be achieved.

III) The fatigue meter. Correct fatigue control is the key. It is very tricky because it is cumulative and the body gives false signals about it. Any kind of exertion adds to the fatigue meter and the fatigue level slowly dissipates as the body regenerates – the speed of which depends on the sickness level. So while being sick, leg muscles get tired from a stupid walk around the block and can take a week recover, while in a very good state the recovery can be close to normal.

The fatigue meter has this critical threshold. As long as you are keeping the fatigue below this threshold, you are fine and can work on getting better. But crossing it means a quick relapse right down into the sick stage (on the sickness meter), often undoing months of previous patient progress. 

Not being enough, there are two complications.

One is that there is no way (that I know of) of knowing where that threshold currently is. Sometimes I can trek outdoors for a couple days and be ok, while another time running after a tram is all it takes to cross it. Generally the lower the I) fitness and worse the II) the sickness, the lower is the threshold too. But reality is complicated beyond my, and probably the general, understanding.

The other issue is that the fatigue level itself is very obscure – often you don’t feel it. You can do an exercise, then feel totally fine the next day, and the next day too, then do another exercise on the fourth day – they add up and you are fucked right there.

So how to know when it is finally safe to be active?

They key here is to be as careful and pessimistic as possible. People say “listen to your body”. But in this case the body can’t be relied on at all. Primarily, keep conscious track of any activity, imagine the meter and don’t add any more unless you know that enough time has passed for the fatigue to dissipate. So if you exert yourself and feel great the next day – no. It is a lie. Don’t fall for it.

The whole sentence is “listen to your body for a no”. If anything does not feel right, take the safe option.

Now to not be entirely pessimistic here I have to say that for me there is one very specific feeling in my muscles that seems to really signal that they are genuinely regenerating and I should soon be able to work again. But it is a slow learning process where I have many times misjudged it so I simply can’t recommend anything other than maximal caution.

Hope at the end

Even though I have learned and understood all these things, I was not able to make it work for myself and things have been slowly and steadily going downwards to the point it starting looking hopeless a couple months ago. But then I got recommended to a specific exercise method that apparently has helped many CFS people to get back to a normal life and so far it is doing miracles for me. It is the Wim Hof method. In short, it is a combination of breathing exercises and exposure to cold, along with some yoga, although I don’t think that part is essential. What it does is that as crossing the fatigue threshold throws the body into a sick state, this exercise is able to kick it right back into the good state, and keep it there. It makes sense with the current shaman level understanding of CFS which is that it is a sort of safe mode, “hibernation” of the body tied with poor oxygen utilisation. This breathing/cold combo then kicks the body into a “ready” state to be able to face the harshness of the natural environment. Or maybe it does something entirely different, who knows. It seems that it only works for some people and again, there is no saying whether it is because of different causes behind CFS, differences in people, doing something wrong… But it works for me (so far) so in my opinion, it’s worth a shot.

Understanding general statements

How fights start

Over and over I hear exchanges in these lines:
A: *General statement about something* (e.g. “Asians are smart”)
B: “How can you say that is true for ALL? There are exceptions!”*, basically calling the whole A’s statement invalid, often turning into an argument and accusations of racism.
This is a template of any attempt of a productive discussion on controversial subjects, especially in the US. A lot of misunderstandings and social conflict could be avoided if only people better understood what general statements actually mean.

There are two reasons why B’s interpretation is wrong. (In the end they are the same thing)

1) The interpretation of A’s general statement to apply to all/everyone is wrong.
2) Exceptions cannot make rules.

Interpreting general statements

By pure logic, “Asians are smart” is indeed wrong. But we are dealing with the real world and the issue is about language conventions rather than logic. But it takes some logical thinking to understand the conventions (or lack of logical thinking to not to). “Asians are smart” can be understood in two different ways – only one makes sense, but the other is often the result.

It is obvious that not every single Asian is smart. If I am not seriously mentally impaired, it is obvious that I know that. So why would anybody assume that when I say “Asians are smart”, I mean that every single one is?

Although logically correct, this interpretation does not make any sense in vast majority of real cases and is useless. Therefore, another interpretation should be used instead that that would be meaningful and useful. That interpretation is that the statement is true for a significant part or statistic**.

To show it on the example: we can assume that the general statement (“Asians are smart”) does not mean it is true for every instance (“every single Asian is smart”) as B did, as that is out of reality. Instead it means that it is true for a significant part (“most Asians are smart” or “In average, Asians are smart” or “The ratio of smart people is higher with Asians than some other group”) – which is the meaning that A intended.

Sometimes we really want to say something about every single instance. But in that case we can say it explicitly – “All Asians are smart”. But even in many such cases we can assume that the person is just intentionally over-exaggerating. It is all about trying to understand.

Exceptions do not make rules

The no. 2) of B’s wrongs is more simple, but maybe even more important. Let’s use another example – “Dogs have four legs”. That is something we kind of accept. But then some B comes and says “No way, I have seen a dog that had an accident and has 3 legs. So dogs have three or four legs”. … or any other number they identify with. And you will get arrested if you say they have four from now on.
By pure logic it is true we can’t say “dogs have four legs”, as a single exception is enough to invalidate a general statement. But that is not very helpful for our daily life – which is an argument I already made with no. 1).
The important angle here is that because of an exception of a 3-legged dog we shouldn’t alter and destroy a helpful rule and be saying that dogs have three to four legs. Even though it would be more correct, it would harm our everyday life. Just imagine the confused children.
Every rule has exceptions. That is a part of what real-world rules are. Exceptions do not make rules, they underline them. Dogs don’t have three legs and people do not have 129 genders. Yet, in Canada, you can get arrested for claiming there are only two.

So to sum it up – when somebody says a general statement, they most likely do not mean all/everybody. Just try to be positive – first try to understand what they mean and what makes sense***. People usually mean well. It can avoid a lot of bad things happening.

————————————————-
* The reaction seems to depend on what the general statement is about though. Saying “Africans have lower average IQ” is quite guaranteed to invoke the response “You racist, how can you say that ALL Africans have low IQ?” at the least – while saying “ALL white males are privileged Trump voter racist sexual predators” seems to be fine.

** Does not even have to be a majority. With “Fish live in water” we mean pretty much all of them. But “driving is dangerous” does not mean we have an accident on most drives, only that the danger is somehow statistically higher than some other activity.

*** Applies even to stupid people. They can mean it the wrong way, but everybody should get a chance first.

Killing should not be easy

Should machines be allowed to make life and death decisions? With technologies already up to the task, this is a pressing question, but not an easy one.

Although there is a strong opposition from the scientific community, the force seems to be on the proponent’s side. Not only do the weapon manufacturers hold virtually unlimited resources and are backed by their governments, they have pretty strong arguments on their side as well. At least on the first glance that is.

Arguments for and against autonomous weapons

The resistance is natural as killing machines go against our basic instincts. We are frightened by an image of machines that can kill us – without feelings, without a chance to read them, predict them, negotiate with them. It is a combination of hopelessness and the fear of the unknown. The way people put this into words is by saying that the decision to kill people should be left to people, for they are restrained by compassion and human goodness. Allowing machines to kill would mean more deaths as these limitations would not exist.

But the proponents argue that allowing machines to make the decisions would actually lead to fewer deaths and especially eliminate the unwanted ones. Machines are more accurate and effective. But the main reason is the same one the opponents use – machines have no emotions. No anger, no killing spree, no hatred. Machines will not kill anyone they are not supposed to kill. These arguments are correct. Autonomous weapons would indeed make the killing more accurate and safe. But they are wrong about the consequences.

Why is it wrong?

Making killing more accurate and safe means making it easier, and that is not a good thing. Nowadays, ordering a kill strike carries a lot of risk and responsibility. The decision makers need to think twice before they take the risk of the mission not going perfectly right – having to carry the weight of civilian deaths, having to sweep it under the rug, or even worse, being exposed in the media. Because of these risks and occasional accidents, strikes are being questioned – by the public, the decision makers, as well as those who pull the trigger and have to live with it.

On the other hand, imagine that ordering a kill has no risks whatsoever. The public is already convinced that nothing “bad” (i.e. no unintended deaths) can happen, decision makers are free of the civilian death nightmare and those pulling the trigger feel nothing at all – they are machines. Targeted killings would become a simple effortless routine, an easy universal solution that will be used in many places in which it was unthinkable before. Because of the general perception of being safe and moral, there will be no interest from the public and journalists anymore, no scrutiny, no raised eyebrows. The result of that will not be increased safety, as the proponents say, but a wide abuse of the targeted automated killing to remove whoever is inconvenient. Because, why not, when it is so easy?

So while the arguments for autonomous killing machines are safety and less unintended casualties, the actual result will be a large increase in intentional casualties, with accidental deaths of bystanding civilians being replaced by intended deaths of uncomfortable ones.

Therefore, killing should not be easy, and autonomous weapons are not a good thing.