The ethics of machines

Health first. NSW recorded another 344 new COVID cases in the previous 24 hours. Less than yesterday but not by much. The other significant news was that the NSW Government addressed the tentatively planned end-of-lockdown, which had previously been stated as late August. Now that’s changed dramatically – they were tossing around “October” and “November” instead, as target dates for 70-80% vaccination rates and subsequent easing of movement restrictions. Sydney has been in lockdown for 7 weeks now, and perhaps we have another 3 months to go. I think the higher contagiousness of the Delta variant, combined with the Government’s apparent refusal to consider more stringent lockdown measures, is making any effort to reduce the infection numbers futile. The Government indeed seems to have given up on driving the numbers down, being content to hold the increase below exponential, and banking on vaccination numbers in a few months being enough to eventually stop it. I guess we just have to wait and see, though given the experience of the UK and USA, I’m not particularly optimistic.

In other health news, I had my final follow-up appointment with the doctor after my tonsillectomy. Everything seems fine, except I’ve had an annoying bitter taste in my mouth ever since the surgery. This is a known side-effect of adult tonsillectomies, occurring in some percentage of cases. The doctor said it was caused by stretching of the nerves during the surgery by the various clamps and things they have to stick down your throat, and should fade over a few months. It does seem to have been getting less intense, so hopefully it will fade away soon.

Today I mostly spent working on planning for my online ethics classes for the current week. The topic is “Machines and Robots”. I started with a story of a man losing his job to factory automation, asking questions about how he would feel, how his boss might feel letting staff go, and whether it was okay for companies to replace humans with machines. I went on with a story of the historical Luddites, who smashed clothmaking machines in England in the 1810s, with questions on why so many people felt so threatened that they took such action.

Then I went on to machines that pose dangers to people. If a machine injures someone, whose fault is it, if anyone’s? I used an example of a robotic vacuum cleaner gong haywire and slamming into someone, breaking a toe. I got a wide range of responses, from one kid this evening who said it’s the person’s fault, because you shouldn’t trust a machine and should be careful; one said it’s the manufacturer’s fault; one said it’s nobody’s fault because it’s probably a glitch that nobody could have predicted; and one thought the government should make and enforce safety guidelines. So that was interesting and good!

I moved on to (future) robots doing dangerous jobs. Imagine you’re a government official with the job of deciding if new police robots should take the job of human police officers. What issues would you think about before deciding? Would you let robot police carry guns? Would it be okay for a robot police officer to shoot a bank robber if it saved the lives of innocent hostages in the bank? Is it okay to program a robot to kill people in certain situations, or is that something that should never, ever be allowed?

When I ran the class this evening, it was a really good discussion, with the kids split on a lot of the questions – which is always much more fun than when they all agree! One was of the opinion that robots are still just tools, and could be used like any other tool, and didn’t see any issue at all with letting a robot police officer go into a dangerous situation and shoot some criminals – even thought it was preferable to risking a human officer’s life. Another kid was adamant that robots should never be given weapons, because they could go berserk and start killing people willy-nilly.

Finally, in a sad confluence of my two topics today: COVID and ethics, one of the kids in my class today had COVID. She was the first to join the Zoom meeting, and I made smalltalk and asked her how she was, and she said she had caught COVID, and was isolating from people at home! She did seem slightly ill, like she had a cold or something, but said she felt reasonably okay.

It was rather shocking. This is the first person I’ve known personally in any capacity to have contracted COVID. She’s been one of my best students too – very bright and articulate. I really hope she recovers and doesn’t suffer any long-term effects.

On a happier note, a flower I photographed on Sunday, after the rain:

Rainy lily

New content today:

Secret projection

Its been a busy day, mostly working on my current secret project. I wanted to reach a certain milestone today, and just managed it. Not much else to say about that.

COVID news was very bad here today, with another record high of 356 new cases for NSW.

For dinner I made shortcrust pastry and used it to make a mushroom quiche.

I really can’t think of anything else interesting I did today.

New content today:

Late image processing Monday update

I was busy Monday evening with the image processing university course that I’m helping to teach. It was the first lecture to be followed by actual exercises for the students to do, which is the part I’m helping with. I spent much of the afternoon preparing by going through the exercises myself, and teaching myself a bit of Matlab at the same time.

The lecture part was good, with close to 200 students joining in on a Zoom meeting. Then we split up into teams of 5 students, each team with two assigned tutors to assist them. For this we used Microsoft Teams, where the lecturer had assigned each group to a separate team within the app. I had to jump between several teams to see if the students needed help and then assist them.

The problem I had was that several of the teams started voice chats to discuss the exercises. I tried joining one and was initially muted. I hit the unmute button and started talking… and after a while someone in the Zoom meeting said that I was talking there to all 200 students! I placed the MS Teams and Zoom windows so I could see both on my screen. I hit the unmute button in MS Teams, and I saw that Zoom also indicated I was unmuted there. Zoom was responding to mouse clicks and keyboard commands that should only have gone to MS Teams!

So I had no way of unmuting myself in MS Teams without also unmuting in Zoom! After a few minutes I had to shut down Zoom so that I could use voice chat in MS Teams. But even after I’d done this, the unmute function started to work intermittently in Teams – sometimes I’d start talking, thinking I was unmuted, but they couldn’t hear me, and sometimes they could. It was incredibly frustrating.

So I spent most of the time just using the text chat feature in MS Teams to provide assistance to the students. I’ll have to look into the muting function and see if I can work out what’s going on, and why there’s a weird interaction with Zoom. By the end of the hour assigned for the exercises, I felt like I’d been useful for several of the teams, so that was good at least.

With the class ending at 9pm I neglected to write this up and just wound down before bed time.

New content today:

A day without water

At 5 pm this evening, one of my neighbours knocked on my front door. She’s on the owner’s corporation executive committee and was here in an official capacity, to tell me that Sydney Water was doing some work in the street and that all water would be turned off for our building from 6pm to midnight.

My thoughts rapidly progressed from “okay, that’s not long, no problem” through “wait, how am I going to cook dinner?” to “oh crap! Wife and I both need to have showers, and I need to get a sourdough loaf-in-progress made and kneaded and then clean up the mess before 6pm!!”

I spent the next hour running around like crazy, having a shower, filling a bunch of water jugs and containers, making sourdough, washing up mixing bowls and utensils, cleaning the kitchen generally, and then filling the sink with hot water so after we ate dinner I could at least put the dirty dishes and utensils in there so they don’t dry out and go all crusty. Fortunately we had just enough warning, and I got everything done in time.

It’s actually been a wet day, with light to medium rain in the morning and afternoon. There was a break of a couple of hours around midday, which we timed well for a long walk with Scully. Apart from that I’ve been looking at material for tomorrow’s image processing course lecture and the accompanying tutorial for which I’ll be teaching. The first real work looks straightforward enough, about image compression formats and simple preprocessing operations such as contras adjustment and histogram equalisation. Tomorrow I’ll play with the MatLab code and make sure I can manage it all.

In COVID news, NSW recorded 262 new cases, which is lower than yesterday’s 319. The numbers are still bouncing up and down, although with an overall upwards trend, so it’s not clear if this is actual good news yet.

A friend pointed out to me today that the USA has again recorded over 100,000 new cases in one day, which just sounds absolutely crazy. I’m here giving daily horrified reports of how we’re dealing with a couple of hundred cases where I live, and other parts of the world are in much worse situations. I’m thankful that we’ve really had it relatively easy in Australia compared to many countries, while at the same time concerned about the cases we do have. It’s an odd sort of disconnect. I guess I just can’t really imagine what it must be like to live in a place with roughly a hundred times as many cases per capita. I think I’d be too scared to leave the house at all.

New content today:

Finding lost photos

Today I wanted to find a moody photo of a lighthouse for use in a small project. I like taking photos of lighthouses when I get the chance, so I knew I had several to choose from. While my computer has a neat text search facility to find files, it can’t locate photos of specific subjects. So I used Flickr’s search to go through the lighthouse photos I’ve uploaded there. Settled on this one:

Square and Round

This is a photo I took of Macquarie Lighthouse in Sydney, using black and white film and a Lensbaby lens. Flickr says I took it in November 2010. So then I looked through my photos on my computer for November 2010 (I have all my photos organised by year, month, and date). And I couldn’t find it.

Photos taken on digital cameras have the date encoded in the file, so you can be relatively sure of what date they were taken. But this one was taken on film and then developed, and then scanned at some later date. So I figured the Flickr date might be when it was uploaded, meaning it was taken some time earlier.

Now, I acquired a big batch of black and white film around the start of 2009, and I knew this was taken with some of that batch. So I had roughly a couple of years of folders to search through. I did so… and couldn’t find this photo anywhere.

Then I figured that maybe it was on the start of a roll that I hadn’t finished in 2010, and I searched forwards for the next time I took photos using black and white film. I found that that was actually 2016, when I took a trip to New York City, and took a film camera with me. And indeed, I found in my 2016 New York folder that the first few photos were obviously taken in Australia, not New York! And some were of a lighthouse! Aha! I thought I’d solved the mystery.

But as I looked through the photos, I noticed that the lighthouse wasn’t the same one. I’d found a different batch of misplaced black and white film photos. In fact, I didn’t recognise the lighthouse in these photos. Now I had two mysteries. Where were these photos from?

I searched through my photo folders, looking for any clues, but fruitlessly. Eventually I posted a photo to my friends’ Discord and asked if any of them recognised the lighthouse. It turned out that one did, because it was the lighthouse near his parents’ place up the coast in the town of Port Macquarie! With this lead, I looked through my folders for a trip to Port Macquarie, and found one in 2013. These photos belonged there. So I moved them there and wrote up some text notes to remind myself in future that they’d come from the same roll of film as some images from New York, 2016.

The second mystery was solved, but the first remained elusive. I went to my calendar in Flickr to see what else was uploaded around the same time… and I found several small batches of black and white film photos that I recalled taking. I looked for those on my computer, and found none of them!

Finally I realised what must have happened. I probably scanned the negatives myself at work, using the high-res film scanner they had there. And then uploaded a few of the shots to Flickr. But then I must have been stymied by the work policy of keeping computers relatively isolated. When working there, we essentially had no way to transfer files off a work computer to a personal one, other than asking a manager for permission to do so. You couldn’t email yourself an attachment without CCing a manager; you couldn’t plug in a USB stick without notifying IT; you couldn’t use Dropbox; and so on. But there was one hole – I could upload photos to Flickr. I must have done that from work, and then never figured out any way to get the original scan files home.

So I assume my original files are gone. I then spent an hour or so downloading the highest resolution copies from Flickr, and sorting them into suitable folders so I can find them again easily next time. All of this took a few hours, and pretty much killed my afternoon, during which I’d planned to do a bunch of other stuff.

Earlier in the day, I went on a walk with my wife and Scully. I took a couple of panoramas from the point, looking across Sydney Harbour. The first is from above Greenwich Baths, a small public swimming facility made by netting off a small cove of the harbour, looking across the water towards the centre of the city:

Greenwich Baths panorama

The second is a more expansive panorama, with the city at the left and the harbour stretching off to the right.

Mary Carlson Park panorama

COVID news: 319 new cases in the previous 24 hour period in New South Wales, up from yesterday’s record of 291. And 5 deaths, which is just horrible. I’m really beginning to think these numbers simply aren’t going to turn around with the current lockdown strategy, and we’ll just have to wait until 80% or more of the population is vaccinated, which is estimated to be around November or so. Media and a lot of the public are calling for the lockdown measures to be strengthened, but I really don’t think this government wants to do it.

Also, I used a mapping site today to determine that I haven’t been more than 2.8 km from home since 20 June, almost 7 weeks ago.

New content today:

Forbidden Waters ending

It’s virtual games night with my friends, and we’ve just completed our ongoing game of Forbidden Waters, which has taken us three session to finish. We cooperated enough to win the scenario as a group, but several of us ended up with individual bad story endings. In particular I was a seasick pirate, and I ended up sentenced to life in a floating prison, where I was sick every day.

The COVID news here was dire again, with 291 new cases, a new record high for the state.

New content today:

New COVID record

New South Wales recorded 262 new COVID cases in the last 24 hour period, a new record high since the beginning of the pandemic. Today’s press conference was an exercise in the politicians evading questions about further lockdown measures, and sticking to the single line that people should go get vaccinated as soon as possible. The Chief Health Officer stressed that people should get their second doses as soon as possible, to get protected as soon as possible, even if it sacrifices long term immunity by being less than the recommended wait between doses – since everyone is going to need booster shots in another year anyway.

Not wanting to take any more risks with disease than necessary, I contacted my vaccination clinic to see if I could move my second dose appointment up from 1 September. They gave me an 18 August booking, cutting 2 weeks off my wait. I really don’t want to end up being exposed somehow and getting COVID just days before being fully vaccinated.

Apart from that I mostly spent today jumping between writing Darths & Droids comics, and being distracted by my wife’s work-from-home IT hardware woes. I won’t go into details, but suffice to say that her being on the phone to IT support all day is more distracting than her regular work.

With Darths & Droids I set myself a target of writing and making 3 new strips. For the next part of the story I had to review our planning notes in some detail, which took some time, and then do some additional note making to tie things together a bit more, before starting to write. I did end up writing four new strips, but haven’t had the time to make any of them yet. So… partial success. Honestly, I’ve had less productive days when distractions and creative block have conspired.

New content today:

New ethics day!

Today I had a couple of tasks with Scully in the morning. I needed to run an errand to pick up something first thing in the morning and took Scully with me for the walk. And then not long after I got back my wife had to leave for an appointment. We’ve found the hard way that if she leaves while I stay home with Scully, Scully cries and whines non-stop until either my wife gets home, or Scully finally gives up about an hour later. The simple way around this is if I take Scully on a short walk and my wife leaves while we’re out. Then when I return home with Scully and my wife isn’t here, she just settles down and is fine. Who knows what goes through a dog’s mind?

After that I knuckled down to write the lesson plan for my next week of online ethics classes. The topic this week is “Creators and their works”, probing questions such as:

  • If you found out the writer of a book/movie you loved was a bad person, would that affect your enjoyment of it?
  • Should people care about liking the work of a bad person?
  • Is it okay to buy a book or movie created by a bad person, thus supporting their work with money?
  • Should the works of bad people be removed from libraries, or art galleries? Should they be removed from sale?
  • Should you find out about the person who created something before deciding if you like it?

I also had a contingency extension asking if it’s okay to use an invention or scientific breakthrough that was made by a bad person, and if that’s different to liking a work of art made by a bad person. And I explored whether the art form made a difference, in particular with the case of popular music, where people who like the music often also admire the band members, perhaps seeing them as role models, and if this is different to books or paintings, where the creator feels more distant.

And this evening I had two consecutive classes, rather than the one I’ve had on Wednesdays. I created a new Wednesday timeslot last week, and it filled to the capacity of four students by today! It seems my class is popular enough that I could probably keep adding new timeslots every week and keep having them fill up.

During the classes, I think this topic went more smoothly than last week’s on peer pressure. Last week I ended up with a lot of similar questions, and simple yes/no responses, and all the kids agreeing with one another. But today the questions were more open-ended and prompted more discussion, especially as in each class there ended up being some disagreements between the kids’ opinions. So I’m really happy with this one.

New content today:

The meaning of life

COVID news: 199 new cases in NSW in the past 24 hour period. It’s dropped below 200, but may still be statistical fluctuation. At least it’s not growing rapidly, although secondary indicators show that our health system may be beginning to struggle. There are outbreaks in several hospitals, with dozens of medical staff now in isolation. And for the first time our contact tracers have been unable to do 100% follow-up of suspected COVID exposure contacts within 24 hours. If the contact tracing system starts failing, there will be more potential cases circulating in the community without isolating during their infectious period, and things could go south quickly.

Every day this past couple of weeks has felt like teetering on a knife-edge. All we can do is maintain distancing from all our friends and family, stay at home, and hope tomorrow’s news is better.

In a more positive piece of news today, Telstra (our major telecommunications carrier) has announced that from now on all payphones will no longer be “pay” phones – they are going to be free of charge. All calls to Australian land lines and mobile phones made from a public phone will be completely free. We still have around 15,000 public phones in Australia, because of a government requirement of Telstra to maintain infrastructure to allow convenient access to communication for all Australians. Public phones have become more scarce in major cities (although I know of several within walking distance of my home), but are still common in rural towns and Outback communities. In a somewhat uncharacteristic moment of civic generosity, Telstra has decided that they can afford to write-off the $5 million a year it takes to maintain the public phones, and simply allow anyone to make calls for free. I tried to find out if any other countries have made this move, but Google was particularly unhelpful with any search query I tried, so I don’t know.

I spent time today writing and making Darths & Droids comics.

But this evening I had a special ethics lesson, as part of the NSW Primary Ethics volunteer teaching that I would normally be doing eevery Wednesday morning at a local school. Those classes have not begun this term due to the Sydney COVID lockdown and schools being closed, so Primary Ethics has organised a series of Zoom classes for the volunteer teachers, led by a staff member who runs a class form the new high school ethics curriculum.

So tonight I joined a class of 16 teachers, and we answered questions based on the high school ethics topic of “The Meaning of Life”. A big question! This is a brand new topic, which hasn’t been trialled in high schools yet, due to the course only starting this year, and being interrupted by COVID. Obviously we weren’t going to actually come up with an answer to the meaning of life – the class was structured around pondering questions like: “Can there even be any simply definable meaning of life?” “If we could know the meaning of life, would it change how we behave?” and, my favourite, “Why did the aliens in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy go to such great lengths to try to find the meaning of life?” (really a proxy question for: Why do we try to figure out the meaning of life?)

It was fun, and it gave me some cool ideas for tackling a similar topic in my own online ethics classes.

Random photo I took while out walking around the neighbourhood yesterday:

City over roof

New content today:

First image processing lecture

This evening was the first lecture and tutorial of the image processing course that I’ll be tutoring for this semester. I had a bit of a mad scramble today when I realised that I needed a Zoom account based on my new university email address, and also a Microsoft account with the same address for using MS Teams, and then realising I had no idea how to get them as the university domain had been reserved by the university with both Zoom and Microsoft, so I couldn’t just create a new account and choose my own password. I had to go via the university somehow.

In the end I figured out MS Teams, but I still haven’t figured out what to do about the Zoom account – I may need to contact the university IT department or something. Thankfully I could join the Zoom lecture as a guest, and told the lecturer my predicament (via email) and he let me in.

The first lecture was very introductory, and the tutorial segment was just the lecturer going through some basics of how to use MatLab. Next week we get stuck into some more meaty content, and the tutorial part will be the students doing exercises while I supervise and assist, mostly via MS Teams I think. There are 5 tutors and I think each will be assigned a subset of the students to look after, so I’ll have about 30-40 students to handle. So next week will be the real test of how well I do with this! Hopefully I’ll get a Zoom account sorted by then.

New content today: