As we watch robots, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence machines and the like slowly (and sometimes rapidly) permeate our world, it’s not hard to imagine them going from permeating to taking over. Reaching that point, even those who don’t watch sci-fi movies can see the possibility of rogue robots and AI machines using computer logic to eliminate the one thing that could stop their takeover – humans – and initiating a robot apocalypse. Fortunately, some computer scientists in California have developed an algorithm that trains robots to always avoid the bad, human-elimination decisions and stay on the path of good, obedient servitude instead. How well do you think this will work?

“We want to advance AI that respects the values of its human users and justifies the trust we place in autonomous systems.”

In a Stanford University press release announcing the publication in the journal Science of the paper “Preventing undesirable behavior of intelligent machines,” Emma Brunskill, an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford and senior author of the paper, illustrates the alleged noble goal of robot and AI developers – making them tools for the good of humankind – and describes the algorithm she and her colleagues have designed to accomplish – and hopefully guarantee – that goal.

“We show how the designers of machine learning algorithms can make it easier for people who want to build AI into their products and services to describe unwanted outcomes or behaviors that the AI system will avoid with high-probability.”

The idea is to describe bad decisions and behaviors mathematically. While “don’t do this or the patient will die” decisions are easy to describe, behaviors such as gender bias – a line AI is crossing as it’s used more and more to evaluate employment or school applications – requires a sense of fairness that is obviously much harder to define mathematically. The Stanford researchers modified the algorithm in a program designed to predict the future grade point averages of students and it learned to avoid bias toward one gender. While “fairness” is much more vague than “life or death,” the researchers believe it can – and should – be built into all AI using their algorithm.

Does all of this sound familiar? The paper refers to this solution as a “Seldonian algorithm” and fans of Isaac Asimov will recognize that obvious reference to Hari Seldon, the mathematics professor at Streeling University on the planet Trantor in Asimov’s “Foundation” sci-fi series. Seldon developed psychohistory, an algorithmic science that allowed him to predict the future in probabilistic terms. It worked for Hari Seldon … will it work for us?

“Given the recent rise of real-world ML applications and the corresponding surge of potential harm that they could cause, it is imperative that ML algorithms provide their users with an effective means for controlling behavior. To this end, we have proposed a framework for designing ML algorithms and

shown how it can be used to construct algorithms that provide their users with the ability to easily (that is, without requiring additional data analysis) place limits on the probability that the algorithm will produce any specified undesirable behavior.”

Why do humans want us to avoid bad behavior when bad behavior is so much fun?

In the paper’s conclusion on using machine learning (ML) algorithms to change robot behavior, that nasty word “probability” pops up. The algorithm is not a 100% guarantee of robot apocalypse prevention and even if it were, it depends on humans using it in all applications. Just as it’s easy to imagine a robot apocalypse, it’s easy to imagine it being caused by unscrupulous businesses leaving the “bad behavior prevention algorithm” out to cut costs or make more profits.

Are we doomed?

Henry Lee was the 19^th century expert on sea serpents, as we have seen in several articles I wrote last week. As far as the 20^th century is concerned, however, there is no doubt about to whom the crown was passed. It was one Bernard Heuvelmans, whose work, In the Wake of the Sea Serpents, is the defining book on the subject. Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman – who, with Patrick Huyghe, wrote The Field Guide to Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents, and Other Mysterious Denizens of the Deep – said of Heuvelmans, who died in 2001: “From 1948 on, Heuvelmans exhaustively sought evidence in scientific and literary sources. Within five years he had amassed so much material that he was ready to write a large book. That book turned out to be Sur la piste des betes ignorees, published in 1955, and better known in its English translation three years later as On the Track of Unknown Animals.” As for In the Wake of the Sea Serpents, it became a classic – and, to this day, it very much remains a highly important research tool for creature-seekers everywhere.

Of particular significance is Heuvelman’s theory – based upon 358 sightings – that there are far more than just one kind of animal that falls into the sea serpent category. Heuvelmans’ list of creatures is an important one. It not only describes the physical appearances of the animals: it also reveals which kinds of creatures are most often seen – at least, at the time that Heuvelmans compiled his list. He began with what he termed the “long-necked” type, for which Heuvelmans had forty-eight reports. This particular group, he added, had necks that ranged from long to “very long,” a “median hump on the back,” and a pair of horns on the head. As for the color of the creatures, they were typically mottled.

Second on Heuvelman’s list was the “merhorse.” It had, said Heuvelmans, a “long floating mane,” huge eyes, a long neck, and whiskers on the face. For this entry, Heuvelmans had studied no less than thirty-seven cases. The third entry was focused on “many-humped” animals. As their title suggests, they had a “string of dorsal humps of virtually equal size.” The necks were not overly large, and had white stripes on their necks. Now, we move onto the “many finned” beast of the deep. As for these creatures they had “several triangular fins looking like a huge crest.” They also had a jagged crest on the spine and “prominent” eyes. Then, there was the “super otter.” Heuvelmans described it as having “a slender medium-length neck” and a “long tapering tail.” The color was beige or grey, according to the thirteen sightings that Heuvelmans had in his files.

The “super eel” plays an important role in Heuvelmans’ work, as in more recent times reports of massive eels are growing and growing. Twelve reports that Heuvelmans had on file allowed him to make a good image of the animals. They had a long neck, one which formed “am extension of the head.” The tail was “long [and] tapering,” “Leaps out of the water and falls back with a splash,” Heuvelmans told his readers. “The marine saurian” was very much like a crocodile, albeit seen in an “oceanic habitat.” Then, there was the “father-of-all-the-turtles.” Yes, we’re talking about giant turtles, a subject that I will return to here at Mysterious Universe on a later occasion. And, finally, Heuvelmans introduced his followers to “yellow belly,” a beast that was yellow with black stripes. Heuvelmans said of his list that, “It is not surprising that the types based on a few not very detailed sightings have few determining characteristics. It follows that the least well-defined types may include several different species, not necessarily related to one another.”

If you are into Cryptozoology and have not yet read Heuvelman’s classic book, you really should!

Last week I received a lengthy, rambling series of messages from a guy in Salt Lake City, Utah that – when I finally got around to copy-pasting and formatting it all – amounted to eleven pages in single-spaced Word. I won’t detail the whole story, since it would take an entire batch of articles to do that. Sam (which is his real name) is a twenty-something who has never seen a UFO, has never been abducted by ETs, and has never had a particular interest in the subjects of UFOs and alien life. For a while, however, he did dabble in the occult, which may very well have led to what occurred just a few months back. Here’s the story: Sam found himself in a very weird situation that began in late August of this year, and that he claims is still going on. On the first night of weirdness, he woke up, around 5:00 a.m. in a state of complete confusion on his bed, rather than in it. Sam had had an extremely strange “nightmare” of having been placed into a state of what he called “mind control” a couple of hours earlier, which would have put the time it all began around 3:00 a.m. In that same nightmare, Sam got out of bed, dressed, and exited his apartment. But that’s not all: when he dressed, it was not in his regular, casual clothes. Rather, it was in a black suit, which he put on without giving it a thought. I should stress he doesn’t own a black suit.

Sam cannot remember what happened after he left the apartment, that is until he arrived at the doorstep of an apartment only two blocks down from his. He recalled knocking on the door, which was opened by a woman with a blank look on her face – and who seemed to have no problems about letting a complete stranger into her home at what, by now, was around 4:00 a.m. Sam recalls entering the living-room, with the woman in front of him. He then warned her never to talk about a UFO encounter that she had just a few days earlier – a case that involved “missing time” but not an “abduction.” In his strange state, Sam could hear himself saying the threatening words, but it was as if “it wasn’t me saying it. It was coming from my mouth, but it wasn’t me.” Sam then left, walked back to his home, and went to bed. He fell asleep – and then woke up around 5:00 a.m., as described earlier. In the morning, the suit was nowhere in sight. All that was left were the vivid  memories of that odd night of what Sam fully believes was a case of possession, rather than just a bad dream.

Sam claims that roughly the same scenario has now occurred on three occasions: he wakes in the early hours, dresses in a black suit (which is never still there when he wakes at his usual wake-up time of 7:00 a.m.), and then heads off to the home of the targeted individual, which, so far, is always the same woman. As with the first occasion, he cannot recall how he gets to the home of the person, although he recalls walking back. Oddly, even though he knows the woman lives nearby, he is never able to find her apartment when he is in a normal state during the day. It’s as if (he believes) that he’s being prevented from finding the location – that is, until he is required to make another late night threat. Then, he has no problem at all finding the site. It’s a result of all this undeniable weirdness that Sam chose to contact me, having done some online research and seen that I have written several books on the MIB and one on the Women in Black phenomenon. Sam believes that demons have control of him and that those same demons are behind the MIB phenomenon. In Sam’s world, those same demons use us – in a hypnotized state – to prevent people from getting too close to the truth of the UFO enigma – which is, in Sam’s view, demonic, too. And they do that by literally turning random people into MIBs, via temporary possession of people like Sam. He believes.

When I began to dig into the story deeply, I realized that it was very similar to one that Timothy Green Beckley had shared with me back in September 2010 (specifically on the 21st of the month). The story, in Tim’s own words, went as follows: “There was one case where I might have been threatened by a Man in Black. There was a publication I wrote for in the 1970s called Official UFO. They published their address in the magazine, so they did get a few crank  visitors to the offices. One of these was a gentleman who claimed he was being stalked by the Men in Black.” As Tim also told me, he eventually got to meet a guy who would later turn out to be an alleged Man in Black. They had a degree of correspondence for a while, as well as a few face-to-face encounters. By the end of the 1970s, however, things started to get very menacing, as Tim told me.

The man in question made a number of disturbing calls to Tim’s home phone number. It was something that led Tim to contact the police. When the police tracked the strange character down, Tim finally got the lowdown on who, exactly, the man really was. It transpired he was a homeless character, spending his nights and days on Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan, New York City. There was a very good reason – beyond just the threats the guy made – why Tim was concerned. Tim explained to me that the man “…must have called fifty times and left crazy, threatening messages that would go on and on. I spoke with his parents, who were in Florida, and they said that although he wasn’t always like this, something came over him now and again.”

Tim had an intriguing theory, one that echoes the story told to me last week by Sam. Tim said: “With cases like this guy, where something came over him, and with the MIB, it’s like a possession, where a paranormal force takes possession of the person and they become the Man in Black, doing what the force wants them to do, but without their knowledge. Afterward, they might not even remember any of it. These people are living on the fringe of society; they are simple-minded people who can easily be controlled and influenced. Someone, say, who might be living in some rundown apartment, is taken over in a kind of trance, and then he becomes one of the Men in Black. He threatens someone, and then he goes back to his normal life after the possession ends, and he doesn’t remember it. But, while he is under the control of whatever is doing this, he’s not quite right. And, like a zombie, is the best way I can describe it.”

I have to say that all of this paints a very strange, even sinister, picture. Of course, the most likely scenario is that Sam was already aware that I had previously addressed this very same theory (in my 2011 book, The Real Men in Black) that the MIB might actually be regular people in the throes of possession and used by…well…something. The least likely scenario is that supernatural, demonic entities are using us as vessels, as a means to threaten witnesses to UFOs (and to paranormal phenomena, too). I personally go with the “most likely” angle. The fact is, though, that in most MIB encounters, the witnesses describe the Men in Black as acting very strange, as if they aren’t fully self-aware, and as if they are performing a role, but they don’t completely understand what that role is – beyond making that veiled threat to keep people quiet about their particular encounter of the UFO- or paranormal-based type.

A very common trope of science fiction and fantasy is that of time travel. There has always been an allure to the idea of traveling between two point in time, of making runs to the past or the future to right wrongs or just out of curiosity of ages long past or of eras yet to come. Yet, is any of it really possible at all? In recent times scientists have put much serious thought into the conundrum of time travel, and it seems that even now no one really knows, and that it is all highly speculative and a slave to the domain of scientific speculation. One prominent scientist who very much liked to think about such things was a world renowned scientist who not only entertained the idea, but also threw a party hoping to entertain visitors from the far future.

The question of whether time travel is possible or not was rather deeply pondered and speculated upon by the late, legendary physicist Stephen Hawking, who over the years changed his stance on the possibility of traveling through time. Officially he seemed to not think it was possible in the traditional sense of the word, publishing a paper in the journal Physical Review D in 1992 called Chronology Protection Conjecture, in which he argued that going back into time was not possible in our current understanding of the laws of physics. In his paper he would state:

It seems there is a chronology protection agency, which prevents the appearance of closed timelike curves and so makes the universe safe for historians.

Stephen Hawking

However, Hawking was a self-professed dreamer, and simply could not resist the allure of contemplating time travel, and indeed he was rather obsessed with time in general. What he came up with as the only possible way that time travel would be even remotely possible was through the use of what is called the 4th dimension. What this means is that while every object that we perceive is in three detectable dimensions, height, width, and depth, physicists often talk of a 4th dimension, which is that of time. Theoretically, all one needs to do is to create a tunnel through this 4th dimension and voila, time travel. Yet it is not as simple as this barebones explanation I have provided here may make it seem.

These theoretical tunnels through the 4th dimension are called “wormholes,” which Einstein predicted linked two separate places in time, and which are thought to hypothetically already exist on an incredibly minuscule scale, at a size even smaller than molecules or even atoms, an impossibly small scale called the “quantum foam.” These wormholes form tiny wrinkles and cracks in time itself, constantly blinking in or out of existence, expanding and shrinking, caught in an eternal state of flux. Considering this very unstable nature and the fact that these theoretical wormholes are only around a billion-trillion-trillionths of a centimeter across, they would not be much good for practically travelling through in their current state, and this is where Hawking’s hypothetical time machine comes into play.

By creating some device that could enlarge these wormholes by several orders of magnitude, it is thought that perhaps they could be enlarged and somehow stabilized to the point that a person could theoretically pass through one point and come out in places far away across the cosmos or even in another time. It is a concept already well explored in science fiction, but could it be a reality? However, ultimately Hawking has deemed time travel to the past impossible due to the paradoxes it would cause, because it would violate a fundamental law of the universe in that effect always happens after the cause. He says of this in his article How to Build a Time Machine:

Through the wormhole, the scientist can see himself as he was one minute ago. But what if our scientist uses the wormhole to shoot his earlier self? He’s now dead. So who fired the shot? It’s a paradox. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s the sort of situation that gives cosmologists nightmares. This kind of time machine would violate a fundamental rule that governs the entire universe – that causes happen before effects, and never the other way around. I believe things can’t make themselves impossible. If they could then there’d be nothing to stop the whole universe from descending into chaos. So I think something will always happen that prevents the paradox. Somehow there must be a reason why our scientist will never find himself in a situation where he could shoot himself.

There is also the matter of the unsteady nature of the wormhole itself. Hawking explains that such a wormhole would create a sort of potent “feedback” that would prevent it from working. He compares this to a speaker at a rock concert, when the sound goes into a loop through the microphone and out of the speaker to create that screeching sound that everyone hates, getting louder on each loop until it potentially destroys the sound system. He says the same thing would basically happen with a wormhole, of which he says:

The same thing will happen with a wormhole, only with radiation instead of sound. As soon as the wormhole expands, natural radiation will enter it, and end up in a loop. The feedback will become so strong it destroys the wormhole. So although tiny wormholes do exist, and it may be possible to inflate one some day, it won’t last long enough to be of use as a time machine. Any kind of time travel to the past through wormholes or any other method is probably impossible, otherwise paradoxes would occur. So sadly, it looks like time travel to the past is never going to happen. A disappointment for dinosaur hunters and a relief for historians.

Despite his assurance that time travel to the past is most likely impossible, ever the dreamer Hawking nevertheless created a rather eccentric and some might even say bonkers experiment. In 2009 he decided that he would throw an extravagant party for any time travelers out there, complete with expensive champagne, balloons, hors d’oeuvres, the works. Hawking actually went through with all this, sparing no expense to set everything up at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, but the catch was that he would not send out the invitations, which contained the time, day, and coordinates, until after the party, his rationale being that real time travelers would be able to receive the invitation and travel back to the party. Hawking would say of these invitations:

I’ve drawn up an invitation giving the exact coordinates in time and space. I am hoping copies of it, in one form or another, will be around for many thousands of years. Maybe one day someone living in the future will find the information on the invitation and use a wormhole time machine to come back to my party, proving that time travel will, one day, be possible.

One of the invitations to the time traveler party

On June 28, 2009, the champagne was set out, including an elaborate champagne pyramid, the food was put out, and Hawking got all dressed up in his finest evening attire. For as much as a publicity stunt that it seemed, he was actually going through with it. Hawking sat there at his lavish party under a giant banner reading “Time Travelers Welcome,” waiting for his guests to arrive, then waited some more, and then continued to wait. Not a single person came through those doors, putting all of that food and champagne to waste. He would later say:

I have experimental evidence that time travel is not possible. I gave a party for time-travelers, but I didn’t send out the invitations until after the party. I sat there a long time, but no one came. What a shame. I was hoping at least a future Miss Universe was going to step through the door.

Now of course Hawking was probably only half-serious about this “experiment,” and it is mostly seen as purely a publicity stunt, but that hasn’t stopped people from discussing why no time travelers arrived. Besides the obvious reason, being that time travel will never exist, there have been an array of other possible reasons as well. For instance, the invitations may not have survived long enough into the future for time travelers to have seen them or the invitations were simply just never found. Time travelers might not have known about the party in the first place. There is also the possibility that the time travelers simply did not want to go to the party, and it also makes sense in that they likely wouldn’t want their existence known so why announce it by showing up to a party thrown expressly for the purpose of proving they are real?

Whatever the reasons, interestingly when Hawking passed away on March 14, 2018, his family actually went ahead and made an open invitation for time travelers to come to the funeral. On the webpage for The Stephen Hawking Foundation there was held a raffle for tickets to the event, and curiously there is a section for applicants born between 2019 and 2038, meaning that people from the future could apply. So, will time travel ever be possible, and if it will be, then where is everyone? Is this purely the realm of science fiction or is there anything to it all? Whether time travel exists or ever will, there are ideas, and at least I hope that Mr. Hawking got some good champagne and food out of the deal.