We Pay the Tariffs

What most of us don’t realize about tariffs is … that we, the consumers of our country, are the ones who pay.  It is a tax on ourselves where, whether by intent or coincidence, it overwhelms any supposed income tax relief. Beyond that, the imposition of improper tariffs have been factors contributing to economic depressions and even civil wars. From the very beginning of our nation our government has used tariffs as a means to encourage and protect local industries and, for the most part, it worked. It allowed small entrepreneurs to grow and compete with long established industries in foreign nations. When administered by the Congress, tariffs often favored some states over others. Finally, in the early 20th Century, Congress handed the power of imposing tariffs to the Executive Branch in order to more nearly serve the needs of the whole country.
I am naive in Economics. So I’ve reached the conclusion that we, the consumers, pay the tariff by a simple thought experiment.  I arbitrarily chose Television sets as an example.  I purchased my 1st TV in 1959, probably a Motorola 19 or 20 inch B&W table model.  The choice of manufacturers at that time were US companies such as RCA, Westinghouse, and Admiral. All of these companies were soon using components supplied by startup Asian companies who had unlimited cheap labor and who, by the 1970’s, had completely forced the US companies out of the TV manufacturing business. So now that all of our TVs are imported, let’s decide to impose a 10% tariff on their price to the US consumer. A friend buys a $1200 Sony TV several months before the tariff is imposed. Now, I purchase the same TV and find that the price is $1300.  Customs collects 10% of the import value of $1000 from the merchant and sends it to the U.S.Treasury. The local merchant adds $200 as his profit to his new cost of $1100 and sells the TV to me for $1300. I have now paid the tariff imposed on Japanese TVs.
Such a tax could greatly benefit our Nation if it were designated to reduce our National Debt … rather than to build some wall …

On Stuttering

Last night, while watching the excellent film, The King’s Speech, I remembered that many years ago I stumbled upon a means of making anyone stutter and thus pointing to one possible cause.  In the film, Albert, Duke of York and 2nd in-line to become King of England, seeks help for his severe stuttering from Lionel Logue, a speech therapist,. In one scene, ‘Bertie’ reads the monologue “To be, or not to be …” perfectly whilst his hearing is blocked with headphones emitting classical music {‘pink noise’ would have been a better choice]. So. What’s going on here?
By the 1960’s most tape recorders used 3 heads in the recording process: an Erase head, a Record head, and finally, a Play head with the tape moving so as to be first erased then recorded. This results in a delay between the time a sound is recorded and when it played back to a listener. In tapes running at a speed of 15 inches/second this would result in a delay of around 100 milliseconds if the heads were separated by 1½ inches.  Speech normally reaches a speaker’s ear in less than a millisecond. If one records their voice while listening to the recording on headphones, they immediately start elongating their words to try to synchronize their speaking with what they hear in the headphones. This soon lapses into uncontrollable stammering. So. A delay in what a speaker hears when s/he speaks can certainly cause stammering. And. When blocking the path of what s/he hears when speaking allows fluent speech, then this implies a hearing delay exists somewhere in the middle or inner ear, or in the brain itself. Finding where the delay occurs may allow finding means to reduce or eliminate the delay. Otherwise, practicing physical techniques for ignoring the delays such as Logue used provides some relief. However. If they had provided King George VI with headphones issuing noise [or possibly ear plugs], he would have produced perfect radio speeches.

Artificial Proscenium

Within our brain we [and presumably any creature with eyes] have a visual proscenium on which we view our surroundings and correlate what we see with all the inputs from our other senses. This visual confirmation is the basis of our reality and our existence in a perceived environment. Artificial Intelligence [AI] does not yet know how to implement this proscenium. Optical inputs from video cameras can be stored in a First In First Out [FIFO] digital memory, and perhaps even correlated with simultaneous inputs from other sensors. But there is no proscenium in the machine that allows it to ‘know’ what it is seeing with these data. The visual cortex of the brain appears to be the location of our proscenium. Also it is known from tests with blind people, that activity occurs in the visual cortex due to performing tasks involving hearing and touch. But what kind of memory area [or volume] is required to combine sensory inputs in a way such that the machine can realize, can know, that it can see.

With a Song in my Thoughts

I dislike getting up before I really want to, but during summer I have to, in order to physically manage to walk up to Starview and back.  This morning I walked With a Song in My Heart in my thoughts. For the past few days I have been ’conjecturing’ again about our concepts of Time. This being triggered, not only by my recent excursions into Artificial Consciousness, but, by an article in Quanta concerning the nature of Time [which I felt was in the same category as How Many Angels Can Dance on a Pin Head]. I’ll ‘Post’ my comments on that, later.  Anyway. I first noticed that I could ‘summon up’ the lyrics in order and with an associated pitch. When a lyric could not be recalled, the tune proceeded until lyric memory kicked in again.  I could easily repeat a section, sometimes recovering a ‘lost lyric’. I could change the tempo. I could sustain a note then proceed a tempo. I could change the key. I could not ‘hear’ the harmony, but I had some ‘sense’ of a change at moments where I know the change is exquisite. I realized that what I was sensing was not the same as if I hummed the tune. If I hum, I hear the actual sound in what’s left of my ‘good ear’. Of interest to me also, is the fact that I seem to be able to hum and hear the correct pitch; whereas, for the past year or so, sounds from the piano vary in pitch depending upon what key my brain assumes. This distressing condition might be due to fewer functioning ‘hair cells’ in the inner ear to properly convey pitch information to the brain. So much for my walk! Now to Break Fast.   

Cosmology

Most of what we each ‘know’ is accumulated by associating new information with information that we have remembered previously. Probably most of our knowledge is about the world around us; about how to deal with our environment. What are the dangers, what are the necessities? If we then become aware, as Carl Sagan would say, of the ‘billions and billions’ of things that are beyond our understanding, we are forced to recognize the existence of ‘something’ that is infinitely more knowledgeable and powerful than we. Since early times, mankind has created religions which seek to explain the unexplainable. As our knowledge base increased, the religions became more refined. Usually these religions offered some explanation of how the world was created and attribute this creation to some Supreme Being who, probably, should be worshipped. Beyond this, most then described how we each should act in our everyday lives to most please our Creator. In my mind, Cosmology is the newest religion, and it conjectures that everything was created by a ‘Big Bang’ when an infinitesimal point (of infinite energy?) explodes(?), eventually creating all this mass. The mathematics describe events from a few nanoseconds out to billions of years, thus eliminating the Seven Days story.  The Apostles of this religion have not yet specified how mankind can get along with mankind. All religions require that their adherents have Faith, so questions as to whence cometh the initial energy, etc., are left to that.

Curiosity

^{Curiosity may be the attribute upon which (conscious) Learning depends the most. So, can an algorithm be devised that can exhibit Curiosity? There is no Why function in Programming Languages. Curiosity seems to imply a Desire to determine Why something is or is not.  How can software cause a machine to ‘want’ to do something? To ‘care’ about something? Wanting and Caring are adjectives that describe some attributes of Consciousness and Self-Consciousness.}

^{What might be a simple aspect of a Why algorithm? Why is?  Why do? Why not? Why can? Why must? Why will?, etc.  Each of these are complex. What is the fundamental action involved in Why?}

Machine Awareness

Now that I can no longer carry intent from one room to the next, I find a new interest. I am overwhelmed by Consciousness, even more by Self-Consciousness, and extremely so when imagining Artificial or Machine Consciousness [AC or MC]. Pain, Pleasure, and an internal display of the surrounding environment, seem to be basic requisites. It would seem impossible to find a way to program pain in a machine. Basically, sensing pain is used by a system to avoid serious damage and even failure of the system. Pain is sensed at the location of the infliction, but requires input to the brain for the sensation to be realized. This brings forth the question of ‘caring’ … perhaps implying a desire for existence and for pleasure. So how would a machine be made to care if it becomes damaged? To ‘feel’ hurt? OK. For now, skip pain. How are we most aware of our own consciousness? In All the Light We Cannot See,  Anthony Doerr writes on p408  So how does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?  There is evidence that this visual display occurs in an area of the visual cortex,V1, where, if non-functioning due to damage, etc., people with blindsight still can sense objects and motion, but cannot ‘see’ them. We can certainly give a device blindsight! Present day video cameras record both a visual and an audible stream and, indeed, do tasks such as detecting faces, but it is not clear how to use such data to implement machine awareness. Overwhelming! So. Pick one care and devise a device that responds to that care. Well, CPUs are already programed to sense their operating temperature and to activate a cooling fan when needed.  Is this primitive awareness? Most certainly not.  The CPU doesn’t care if it burns up, its owner does. The automobile is a machine that has many correlates with living entities.  It requires fuel to work, it has a carburetor which inhales air, it has a fuel pump to circulate fuel and a radiator to provide cooling for the engine and warmth for the cabin, radio and phones for communication, and sonar and radar to allow guidance and the avoidance of external objects. Even so it is certainly not conscious. So, why would we need a machine with awareness? Perhaps to finally understand our own.