AIPIS 132 - Genetic Algorithms with Dr. David E. Goldberg Author of A Whole New Engineer

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Welcome to the AIPIS show for accredited income property investment specialists and those who desire to be. This is your host, Jason Hartman where we talk about increasing your income, your productivity and just generally having a better life while serving your clients better with America's most historically proven asset class income property. We have a great interview for you today and we will be back with that in less than 60 seconds.

It's my pleasure to welcome Dr. David E. Goldberg to the show. He is Emeritus professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois and he's the author of several books starting Way Back in, I believe, 1989. Just a couple titles here for you. One we're going to talk about is A Whole New Engineer, the Coming Revolution in Engineering Education, the Entrepreneurial Engineer and the Design of Innovation, Lessons from and For Competent Genetic Algorithms. This is interesting stuff, folks. So even if those titles don't sound super interesting or maybe they sound nerdy, stick with us because you're gonna like what Dave has to say. Dave, welcome. How are you?

I'm great, Jason. It's really good to be with you.

Well, the pleasure is all mine. And I had to say that for our non engineer listeners, of which I am one, I gu. I don't know what we should talk about first. We've kind of got two broad topics I really want to cover in this interview. I really kind of want to talk first about your renowned research and expertise in the field of AI or artificial intelligence. So many people nowadays are talking about the singularity. Maybe for those who don't know, you can start off by explaining what that is.

Yeah, so there's this idea that technology is accelerating so rapidly that we're going to come to a point where it overwhelms us and perhaps takes over from us. And that's this singularity. And whether or not we believe in that, it's pretty clear that technology is accelerating and becoming ever more important in our lives. And so people who know my recent work on engineering education reform, you know, may not know this background that you alluded to. In doing artificial intelligence back in the.

I'm a trained civil engineer that migrated into computer science. And I got to the pleasure as part of my dissertation work to do some work on something called genetic algorithms or evolutionary computation. And you can give a.

A really simple cocktail party explanation of it. It's the idea of using Darwinian survival of the fittest on the one hand, and ideas from genetics like the idea of having a chromosome and the idea of using mutations and crossover recombinant DNA, if you will. And you take those two things, throw them into a computer, and so instead of designing by hand a jet engine, you would create a chromosome that represents different jet engines. And mom, mom jet engine and dad jet engine would get together and have baby jet engine. And over time, you would evolve generations of better, more efficient jet engines. And this isn't science fiction. This is something that has been used by General Electric to evolve jet engines or companies in Japan to evolve production schedules for steel plants. And even people have used genetic algorithms to evolve music and art. So it's very cool stuff.

That is fascinating. Fascinating. So is this considered, you know, the singularity? Is this bioengineering? I mean, I'm quite fascinated with the idea of 3D printing of kidneys and whatever else we might need.

Yeah, well, so you can use. So genetic algorithms can be separated from biological applications. But of course you can. So you're using the idea of genes to. To create an artificial genetics that helps you evolve the solution to whatever problem. But of course, you can turn that on biological problems and use genetic algorithms to evolve solutions to the design of all kinds of things. If you think about things like nanotechnology, for example, nanotechnology and biotechnology for that matter, you've got perhaps thousands or tens of thousands or millions of decisions to make in designing.

An artificial kidney, to use the example that you're talking about. To do that by hand is impractical.

But nature's been doing this for three and a half, four billion years in this way. And so we use nature's algorithm of choice for evolving and solving hard problems, and. And voila, you end up with pretty good solutions. And not in billions of years. We're doing this on computers. We're doing it real fast. We can do it efficiently.

And so some of the work that I did was instrumental in helping us understand how quickly we can evolve solutions to how complex of a problem.

How much of this can we actually do now? I mean, we're growing ears and body parts in labs, Right. And when do you call this cloning? And when do you call it engineering? I don't know. There's like this blurry line. I don't exactly understand what to call things anymore. Yeah, I guess that means we're approaching the singularity, right?

Well, I'm not sure about that, but. So I think you can.

So when you're a scientist or an engineer and you're involved in these kinds of projects, you.

When you're on the outside looking in, things look a bit magical and a bit mysterious. When you're on the inside using these algorithms, you know, they work for good reason. And these designs come out and you test them and they have. And if they function according to plan, you know, they're doing something good. So.

So when you're in the middle of it, you, you can assign causality or, you know, why things are working for the most part. So it's not.

You know, some of the hype around, around not knowing is, is maybe a bit overblown.

Yeah. Really, this is just incredibly fascinating stuff. You know, can you speak at all? This is probably not your area, but I just thought I'd ask.

Sure.

You know, about what this stuff means. Means to us, what it means to the economy, what it means to society as a whole. And then I of course, want to ask you about the education side, which is fascinating too.

Yeah. So it's.

I think you started off right by saying it's not my area, but. And so, and when we look back on prognostication in eras that were much more slower moving than ours, those were almost, that kind of prediction was almost always wrong.

In profound kinds of ways. So it's, you know, that's one of the things that's so interesting about human creativity.

And now with these kinds of tools and the kinds of leverage that we have, it's perhaps even more difficult to predict what these things.

What these things mean to us. But it seems to me that these innovations get.

Baked into systems in ways that we're not even aware to a certain extent. Some of these advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence are already being baked into it systems that we use on a daily basis. And more of that's coming. And as you say, there are these, you know, nano bio kinds of technological designs that are intractable without using tools like this. So things like this are either here or on the way. And I think.

They will continue to provide opportunity. And there's also a negative side and there's the potential for doing harm.

And so there are ethical questions.

In the degree to which we use these technologies and we Know what they're producing and the side effects of the things that we're producing and the extent to which those are predictable or not. So they're very real questions about sustainability and growth and the ethics of using these kinds of technologies. And.

There are no simple answers. There are no answers like.

Putting your hand up against history and saying stop, that doesn't work very well.

And then on the other hand, fully laissez faire and unregulated trials of say, various kinds of genetic outputs could be very dangerous to us. So that's in many ways the reasons why we need to broaden the education of scientists and engineers in this century.

Yeah, absolutely. One of the areas where I think this has just fascinating wide ranging impact is in the field that is, it just seems like it's booming right now. And that's the area of longevity sciences. You know, the fact that we may be, I don't want to say the fact, but the very real possibility that we may be on the verge of cracking the immortality code. And I don't mean immortality in its purest sense, that might be, you know, maybe.

It might never happen. But you know, certainly some major, major advances in the field of longevity are seemingly pretty close. You know, I, I study this stuff and I find it fascinating and think about what that means to the economy. Think about what that means to the Social Security system, the retirement age, the sustainability. I mean, you know, I always like to give environmentalists a hard time when they're telling everybody else what they should do. The fact is that everybody alive and the fact that they are alive, they are consuming resources. You know, that Malthusian idea that people are just not a resource, they're just a cost only. But you know, people solve a lot of these problems that they do create. We'll see where that balance goes. But just in the area of longevity alone. Wow.

Yeah.

So I agree and I share. I mean, there is a sense sometimes, if you listen to people who are speaking strictly from an environmental or sustainability perspective, that.

Everything'S a cost and everything's a resource and it tends to ignore the innovative capability of human beings. And I think I agree with you that it's a mistake. It's a huge mistake. And it's one of the ways in which.

Predictions are wrong. Predictions can either overshoot and undershoot and there's oftentimes.

A tendency to over predict harm. I mean, so when was the last time you saw an optimistic science fiction movie where the future looked more interesting and bright than the future that we have? And yet in many ways that's, that's the, that's the, if you look back into the, into the 40s or 50s and project forward, that's the lives, those are the lives that we're living right now. And, and they are there in many ways are brighter and, and, and, and things are more optimistic than, than people projected back then.

Yeah, yeah, they certainly are. Very interesting. Well, what's going on in the field of engineering education? You know, I have, with the exception of, you know, the many stars of engineering, mostly in Silicon Valley, I guess that you hear about the people that got into startup and made it big and so forth. You know, it doesn't seem like engineers are really very well paid on the whole. And I think that's kind of unfair because everything we look around, everything we use all day, it's the result of some brilliant engineer. And there was this funny commercial, I wish I could remember what it was for. You probably know what I'm going to refer to here. You know, it had these rock stars and all the women were tearing their shirts off. And then it had Indian engineer guy that invented USB.

And it's flipped the world around. They should be tearing his shirts off. That's something we use every day. Right.

And you know, it's just kind of funny how our culture doesn't seem to allocate the recognition and maybe not the pay correctly. Your thoughts?

Well, so there are, there's an ebb and flow in history to how engineers are viewed. And so if you dial that, you go back in the time machine to the 1800s. There's this period where engineers were rock stars. And I mean we talk about electrical engineers and computer scientists now, but think about the late 1800s. Maxwell's equations have just come out. So people are predicting and some of the first results on magnetics and electromagnetics are out. Radio just come out. And so there were all kinds of companies started and engineers were really stars.

And not just electrical engineers. Civil engineers built bridges and buildings and ships were built of enormous, unprecedented size. So there was this sense of the emergence of large scale technology and the emergence of large scale business, which engineers were at the center of. If you about think there's a terrific history of large scale business in the United States.

The Visible Hand by Alfred Chandler. And he talks about, well, who invented modern business enterprise? And it was the civil engineers who started the railroads because they were the first people to work across vast distances and they needed a different kind of organizational structure. And so they made up modern, modern business enterprise. So there's a sense of excitement back then, which then got squelched in World War I and 2. And there's this phrase that philosopher Stephen Goldman uses. He says engineers became socially captive in World War I and 2. And I think that's a good description. And so engineers, so these large, very large, vertically integrated, return to scale kinds of companies were built and engineers were worker bees in those companies. And that continued and was really sort of reached its apex just Post World War II and the Cold War.

So what you're alluding to in Silicon Valley is a phenomenon between the end of World War II and what has happened now. And if you, I call them the three missed revolutions. We had. We had the quality revolution where statistical quality control went to Japan, came back, and the Japanese beat us around the ears with it.

The entrepreneurial revolution of various garages in Silicon Valley and the IT revolution.

From the microchip to the personal computer to the Internet. And so here we are in the opening moments of the 21st century, and we live in this really different place.

That where once, after World War II, we wanted obedient engineers to shut up and sit down and do what they were told. And now we want the next Steve Jobs who wasn't an engineer, but we want our engineers to be that guy or that gal who starts the next great tech company. And many of our young people, many of the students going into engineering, have those aspirations because they see these role models out there.

Okay, so why is engineering education, why is it so important to our economy?

Well, I mean, so again, if you, you know, so there are roughly 2 million or so people in the US who call themselves engineers are about 4 million or so are in mathematical and computer science. So it's, I mean, it's a pretty big part of the workforce. But, but if you just, if you stand back from it and say, look, we're, we're on this planet, we got 7 billion people on this planet and more coming, and you just do a fundamental analysis of the situation and say, all right, well, what would happen if we did like some people would have us do and turned off the technology? Where would we be? Well, it's hard to know exactly, but if you dial back to the days when there was only crude technology like agriculture, if you go back before crude agriculture, say, dial back 6, 7, 8,000 years or so, what do you got? You got about 100 million people on the planet. So roughly speaking, 6.9 billion of us owe our existence to the technology that's been developed since agriculture. So turning off technology isn't an option. Keeping it going and having it function well and better.

And serve us better as human beings is. Is even more important than ever. And so in that very fundamental sense, having the next generation of great engineers being chosen from amongst our best and brightest is really important.

Yeah, it certainly is. I have always thought that engineering was a very, very important career choice. I appreciate engineers like crazy. You know, you look at it compared to how they're getting sucked away into the game of Wall street. And what was that movie called? Margin, or now, I can't remember the name of the movie, but it was a couple of years ago. The founder of this huge brokerage firm depicted in the movies, probably Lehman Brothers, they were depicting, I'm not sure, comes in at midnight, asks this young kid, you know, who was at Quant, who just figured out this. This whole situation they had that nobody else saw in the company managing the risk. The billionaire head of the company says, so, you know, what's your background, kid? And he says, oh, well, you know, I have a PhD in blah, blah, blah. And he says, you know, basically what that means is I'm a rocket scientist. And he says, well, what are you doing here? And he says, well, you know, Wall street pays a lot better than engineering. And I think that's a sad commentary.

I really do well, and it's interesting. And if you talk to kids today, the students today, the motivations aren't entirely financial. But if you. If you factor in the fact that engineering is itself fairly uninviting and there's this possibility of a larger paycheck, it's hard to fault people. And it's not just an American problem. One of the interesting things we found out in researching the book is, and I had the pleasure of spending time working on engineering education change in Singapore. And so we often think of Asia as our. Okay, if we don't generate enough engineers in America, well, at least we can always turn to China and India and they'll give us the millions of engineers that we need. But even in Singapore, Singapore is the canary in the Asian coal mine for engineers. I was working at the National University of Singapore, and one of the things the engineering dean told me was that it used to be that engineering was the number one choice of young people going and accepted at nus. That's where you went. And many of the people in government were engineers. Many of the people in the top jobs were engineers. Engineering was respected. But they too have fallen on this kind of sense that.

Almost anything but an engineer.

And it seems as though when countries become sufficiently affluent, kids want to do something other than become engineers. And so one of the things that.

We needed, the distinction is, though, with that Wall street example I gave, is that the financial engineers and the financial innovators on Wall street are really just leeches on the economy in almost every case, in my humble opinion, and disagree with me if you like, but all they're doing is finding ways to move things around and relabel things and, you know, cut things up and make derivatives out of them. They don't actually create anything anymore. Okay. You know, granted, companies need capital to grow and thrive and so forth. So conceptually, I don't have a disagreement with the idea of, you know, capital formation in the stock market, of course, but it's just become such a corrupt, you know, as I always say, the modern version of organized crime, you know.

Well, there, there are. I would agree that there are excesses. I guess I'd have. I would disagree to the extent that all of that activity, you know, so the efficiency and capital is important. And I know, I personally know hedge fund managers and.

People and people who work with businesses to help restructure them and make them.

Yeah, I get it. I have investment banker friends, too, and hedge fund friends, too. But, you know, I don't know, it just, you know, like the real value creation is when you create something new out of thin air and it changes everybody's life. That's like actual value. Of course, you need capital to do that many times. So I get it. You know, there's a middle ground.

Well, and I think if you, you know, so I think if you go back, I mean, so again, let's put on, go back in our time machine to the invention of securities, back with the Dutch example and the. I think it's the early trading companies. And so the whole capitalism is actually a fairly early invention. And remarkably, it's actually remarkable how little we teach about capitalism and its history. And many of the objections to capitalism are objections that were held back in the 15 and 1600s when it was first emerging. And we seem to be in the same argument over the course of centuries.

But.

I am a complete capitalist. Don't worry about that.

But those things, the idea of the invention of shares and selling shares and having markets and the efficiency that that brought to capital and the way that it allowed business to scale was.

Was the kind of invention that you were talking about.

Got it, Got it. Yeah. Okay. Well, we don't need to debate that one, but, you know, I get it. Yeah. I want you to Give out your website and then just ask you for some closing thoughts.

Sure. So the.

Website for our work on changing engineering education is www.bigbeacon.org and.

A movement.

To transform engineering education to help bring about engineers that can face that. We've been talking about the ways in which our times have changed and.

How do we educate, really, how do we unleash the courageous engineers that we need for this century, is what the big beacon is all about. And the book is called A Whole New Engineering.

Yeah. And I hope that has an impact on things and we see a lot more people getting into the field because as I mentioned, I think it's just incredibly important. So. Yeah, good stuff. Good stuff. Any closing thoughts? Anything I didn't ask you, you didn't happen to say, you know, just to wrap it all up for our audience.

Yeah. So I think in terms of the kinds of.

The key and one of the big surprises in what we found in working on on education today was the sense that we of empowerment that we give students. And it really comes from three things. Trusted students. When students are trusted by faculty or other students, they end up finding the courage to take initiative, which leads to real learning. And that's the emotional equation that leads to the kind of learning that we need in this century. And I think that's a message that doesn't just apply to engineers. It applies to all kinds of entrepreneurial thinking. It applies to the kinds of opportunities that we face in this century. So that equation from trust to courage to initiative seems to be the kind of unleashing reaction that we're missing in education generally and that we need to get into it.

Yeah. Good stuff. Well, Dave, thank you so much for joining us today. And you thank talking about some of these issues. As I always say, it is an amazing time to be alive. I think the next five, certainly the next 10 years are going to blow our minds quite literally.

We're going to have some amazing stuff coming down the pike. So it's really exciting. It really is.

And I couldn't agree more. Thanks, Jason, for having me on the show, everybody.

That's David E. Goldberg, emeritus professor of engineering at the University of Illinois and the author of the several books that we mentioned.

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