eripsa

Goodbye Blogger!

2006-01-31T00:59:00.000-06:00

Ok, I am now officially moving over to my own webspace, barring any major disasters. I still have a lot to fix up over there, and there are a lot of broken links/broken features/uncategorized posts and so on. But its coming along. It should be tip top by next week.

You can follow my ongoing zany adverntures at eripsa.org. All my old posts should be archived there, and they are now searchable, making it even better.

This was my first blog, and I remained faithful to it for over a year (roughly 220 posts). I feel almost exactly like I did when I moved out of my first studio apartment.

I want to give a shout out

2006-01-30T21:19:00.000-06:00

To all you CSS template writers who don't comment your code. Thanks!

Moving sucks

2006-01-30T17:37:00.000-06:00

I went and got myself some legitimate server space and my very own domain. So this blog will be moving very shortly to eripsa.org. That is, once I bang this stupid wordpress template into shape. You can check in on my progress as I go, but I warn you, it isn't pretty.

My hosting is pretty fancy. I have 10 gigs of space for whatever craziness I want to post (no more relying on imageshack), and 250 gigs of transfer a month, plus all the database frills I want. For 7 bucks a month, thats not bad; and with 24 hour tech support (they already called me once to confirm the subscription) I figure its worth it.

I'll probably put up a message board at some point in the future. I also get a few extra domain names, so if any of my readers want to hop on board this wagon just let me know. I'll keep everyone informed of how the transfer goes, and what hitches I hit along the way.

Ugh, that front page looks so ugly. Back to work. Or play. I can't tell the difference any more.

Bubble generation

2006-01-30T13:01:00.000-06:00

Blogging for future reference/possible addition to blogroll

http://www.bubblegeneration.com/

Survival of the fittest

2006-01-30T12:23:00.000-06:00

breeds more of the same.

From Fox News: Japanese Working On Robot Butler

"We are hoping to make them something comparable to service dogs," Isao Hara, senior researcher at the institute in Japan's technology hub of Tsukuba, just northeast of Tokyo, said of the pair of robots painted in silver and blue. "I think it's quite possible for them to interact with humans. We are now studying how robots can join the human society."

Making the rounds

2006-01-30T12:03:00.000-06:00

There is a really good article on Turing in The New Yorker this week, that goes into much greater detail both on his life and work, and the Enigma problem. As a bit of a teaser:

From The New Yorker: CODE-BREAKER

In 1938, Turing was awarded a Ph.D. in mathematics by Princeton, and, despite the urgings of his father, who worried about imminent war with Germany, decided to return to Britain. Back at Cambridge, he became a regular at Ludwig Wittgenstein's seminar on the foundations of mathematics. Turing and Wittgenstein were remarkably alike: solitary, ascetic, homosexual, drawn to fundamental questions. But they disagreed sharply on philosophical matters, like the relationship between logic and ordinary life. "No one has ever yet got into trouble from a contradiction in logic," Wittgenstein insisted. To which Turing's response was "The real harm will not come in unless there is an application, in which case a bridge may fall down." Before long, Turing would himself demonstrate that contradictions could indeed have life-or-death consequences.

All robots go to heaven

2006-01-27T14:35:00.000-06:00

From Cnet nets: Sony puts Aibo to sleep

According to a company representative, more than 150,000 Aibos have been sold since they went on the market in 1999. But the overall company is in the midst of an historic belt-tightening, and the robotics unit didn't make the cut.

"Our core businesses are electronics, games and entertainment, but the focus is going to be on profitability and strategic growth," said Sony spokeswoman Kirstie Pfeifer. "In light of that, we've decided to cancel the Aibo line."
...

The demise of Sony's robots do mark a victory of sorts for U.S. robot makers like iRobot. Most U.S. manufacturers years ago decided that little market demand existed for robot companions and instead aimed their research and design efforts at robots that would perform jobs that are mundane, repetitive or too dangerous for humans. Workhorse Technologies, for instance, invented a robot that combs abandoned mine shafts.

The scene is set for the future of robots. Lets take this news as closure for the prologue, and get right into Act I, Scene I.

Addendum: Aibo in action.

Generic Lawyer Joke

2006-01-27T13:02:00.000-06:00

Ars Technica reports on a lawyer looking for an easy case against Google. he had the bright idea of writing a bunch of random thoughts like the following:

The Smoke Detector:

I'm so worried about it being a voyeur camera
that whenever I return home, I take it down from
the wall, pry it open, and carefully inspect its
constituent parts. It might be an unreasonable
thing to think or do, but it's the only way I can
get to sleep after I've been out.

Truth is, even sometimes when I've not been gone
I re-check the smoke detector just to make double
sure I didn't miss anything the last time around.
And, thus far, it's been safe. Not once have I seen
anything remotely looking like a camera part inside
the smoke detector.

But they've gotten good with technology, now. I
probably wouldn't be able to tell, anyway. Tomorrow,
I'm moving that thing to the hallway.

He put it up on his site, and waited for the Google spiders to catalogue his 'work' on their servers, and then sued em for 2.5 mil. The judge who made the ruling sided in favor of Google on all counts, and it would otherwise be an entirely uninteresting case except for the precedent it sets.

From Ars technica: Judge: Google cache kosher when it comes to copyright

The judge ruled that Google could not be held guilty of "direct infringement" because such infringement requires "a volitional act by defendant; automated copying by machines occasioned by others not sufficient." Because Google's indexing is automated and the purpose of the indexing is not generally to infringe upon copyright, the judge ruled that they could not be held liable.

You can read the entire decision here (PDF). Its short and worth the read.

Two important claims are being made: that Google as an automated system is independent of the corporation that runs Google (and thus the actions of the automated system do not represent the volitions of the company), and that the automation itself does not constitute a volitional act.

Notable sections of the decision:

The parties do not dispute that Field owns the copyrighted works subject to this action. The parties do dispute whether by allowing access to copyrighted works through "Cached" links Google engages in volitional "copying" or "distribution" under the Copyright Act sufficient to establish a prima facie case for copyright infringement...

According to Field, Google itself is creating and distributing copies of his works. But when a user requests a Web page contained in the Google cache by clicking on a "Cached" link, it is the user, not Google, who creates and downloads a copy of the cached Web page. Google is passive in this process. Google's computers respond automatically to the user's request. Without the user's request, the copy would not be created and sent to the user, and the alleged infringement at issue in this case would not occur. The automated, non-volitional conduct by Google in response to a user's request does not constitute direct infringement under the Copyright Act.

This is all important because of the lawsuit against Google Print, which catalogues books online. The key is whether such copying and pasting constitutes 'fair use'; in this case, the court upheld Google's claim that it does.

Assuming that Field intended his copyrighted works to serve an artistic function to enrich and entertain others as he claims, Google's presentation of "Cached" links to the copyrighted works at issue here does not serve the same functions. For a variety of reasons, the "Cached" links "add[] something new" and do not merely supersede the original work.
...

Because Google serves different and socially important purposes in offering access to copyrighted works through "Cached" links and does not merely supersede the objectives of the original creations, the Court concludes that Google's alleged copying and distribution of Field's Web pages containing copyrighted works was transformative.
...

When a use is found to be transformative, the "commercial" nature of the use is of less importance in analyzing the first fair use factor... While Google is a for-profit corporation, there is no evidence Google profited in any way by the use of any of Field's works. Rather, Field's works were among billions of works in Google's database. Moreover, when a user accesses a page via Google's "Cached" links, Google displays no advertising to the user, and does not otherwise offer a commercial transaction to the user... The fact that Google is a commercial operation is of only minor relevance in the fair use analysis.

This is all very good news that rests of a very shoddy theory of agency.

Obligations to machines

2006-01-25T23:42:00.000-06:00

I have recieved numerous requests to publicly comment on the Google scandal in China. As always, Ars Technica gives the best commentary on this issue, and I agree with their analysis. The scandal, of course, is not with Google's business practices; the outrage is a result of people realizing that Google is a business in the first place.

I wrote the following email to a colleague in response to one such request:

Man, you are like the third person to tell me to post something about
this. I really dont think this has much to do with Google at all-
Microsoft has been in China for a year now abiding by the local
censorship laws, and no one has said squat.

I've ALWAYS held the position that Google is a company first and
foremost, and regardless of what its policy says (ie, "Dont be evil"),
its first priority is to make money. I don't see any contradiction in
its acting by the laws of the local government, even when those laws
are unjust. As popular and powerful as Google is, it can't stare down
a row of tanks.

Kyle responded:

"Microsoft has been in China for a year now abiding by the local
censorship laws, and no one has said squat."

A sort of third-person version of the 'tu quouqe' fallacy. Nice.

"I've ALWAYS held the position that Google is a company first and
foremost, and regardless of what its policy says (ie, "Dont be evil"),
its first priority is to make money."

Having, as one's first priority, the making of money so radically
underdetermines the courses of action one might take, that your premise
hardly provides any information at all, much less something like implication
that the chosen course was the right one. Such an argument, were it valid,
would legitimate all sorts of international rapine of poor and
disenfranchised peoples who happen to live under unjust regimes. IBM made a
lot of money customizing tabulating machines and punch cards to help Germans
keep those Jews in the lines they needed to be in.

I responded thusly:

I'm not arguing that because microsoft did it its ok. I was making the
point that this isn't about Google, even though the media is playing
it that way. The outrage is properly directed at China's censorship
laws, and you can't fault Google for trying to make a buck in a
country that has such laws. From Google's perspective, it is either
abide by the laws of the country or get shut down completely. It is
the rational choice, given its status as a corporation, and with its
obligations to its stock holders, that it proceed with business under
the laws of the land in which it conducts business.

Google of course takes this line, and are trying to spin it by saying
that it is better for the freedom of information that at least some
info gets through, and as the technology of the internet becomes more
commonplace in China perhaps these laws will be changed by the people.
That may be disingenuous, but it surely isn't false.

For the record, Google already censors information in these free
united states. Scroll to the bottom of this page.

I am not arguing that China is right, though I find the Nazi
comparison extreme in these circumstances. But it is simply incorrect
to say that Google's stance with regard to these matters is
hypocritical. It was a sensible business practice to refuse our
government access to the personal information of its users, and it is
a sensible business practice to follow the information laws while
conducting business in China.

The blogosphere is rife with criticism that this damages Google's
reputation as a do-gooder in a sea of evil corporations. I am merely
making the point that it was a mistake to trust Google as a business
in the first place. I will also point out that skepticism with regard
to authority is healthy; you can't believe everything an expert tells
you. If anything, this case secures Google's status as an agent by
reinforcing its fallibility.

I am a big fan of Google as the first widely used artificial member of our linguistic community, and it has succeeded beyond expectations in filling that role. As such, Google serves as the most convincing and familiar example that supports my general thesis, and so I talk about it a lot. It deserves to be talked about alot.

But I don't want this post, or any of my previous posts, to sound like a blanket defense of Google's actions. Google is an agent, with its own incentives, motivations, weaknesses, and decisions. Perhaps this was the wrong decision, perhaps not; that is ultimately for Google's users to decide.

The gay machine

2006-01-24T21:20:00.000-06:00

I wrote the previous post on accident. I was meaning to post a sarcastic response to a review of a new biography of Turing. I ended up writing a draft of the first half of my prelim proposal, and have since lost my sarcastic edge. Now I just want to lay down.

From Scientific American: A Tour of Turing

Leavitt's focus is elsewhere, however. It is on Turing as the gay outsider, driven to his death. No opportunity is lost to highlight this subtext. When Turing quips about the principle of "fair play for machines," Leavitt sees a plea for homosexual equality. It is quite right to convey his profound alienation and to bring out the consistency of his English liberalism. It is valuable to show human diversity lying at the center of scientific inquiry. But Leavitt's laborious decoding understates the constant dialogue between subjective individual vision and the collective work of mathematics and science, with its ideal of objectivity, to which Turing gave his life.

Turing, of course, was unappologetic and unflinching in his sexuality towards anyone who knew him well; the idea that his defense of machines was somehow a sublimated plea for sexual equality is just silly. But let's hope for the sake of my project that this notion of 'fair play' doesn't rest on one man's obtuse metaphor.

For those that don't know his tragic tale, Turing was eventually driven to suicide on account of persecution.

From his Wikipedia article:

Turing was a homosexual man during a period when homosexuality was illegal. In 1952, his lover, Arnold Murray, helped an accomplice to break into Turing's house, and Turing went to the police to report the crime. As a result of the police investigation, Turing acknowledged a sexual relationship with Murray, and they were charged with gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Turing was unrepentant and was convicted. Although he could have been sent to prison, he was placed on probation, conditional on him undergoing hormonal treatment designed to reduce libido. He accepted the oestrogen hormone injections, which lasted for a year, with side effects including the development of breasts. His conviction led to a removal of his security clearance and prevented him from continuing consultancy for GCHQ on cryptographic matters.

In 1954, he died of cyanide poisoning, apparently from a cyanide-laced apple he left half-eaten. The apple itself was never tested for contamination with cyanide, and cyanide poisoning as a cause of death was established by a post-mortem. Most believe that his death was intentional, and the death was ruled a suicide. It is rumoured that this method of self-poisoning was in tribute to Turing's beloved film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. His mother, however, strenuously argued that the ingestion was accidental due to his careless storage of laboratory chemicals. Friends of his have said that Turing may have killed himself in this ambiguous way quite deliberately, to give his mother some plausible deniability. The possibility of assassination has also been suggested, owing to Turing's involvement in the secret service and the perception of Turing as a security risk due to his homosexuality.

In the book, Zeroes and Ones, author Sadie Plant speculates that the rainbow Apple logo with a bite taken out of it was an homage to Turing. This seems to be an urban legend as the Apple logo was designed in 1976, two years before Gilbert Baker's rainbow pride flag.

Fair play

2006-01-24T16:18:00.000-06:00

Keep the ball moving.

The list:

1) Nature and machines

1a) With Descartes, and all philosophers who worried about the determinism of the new science, mechanization was to be associated with natural processes- with the laws governing matter and the mindlessness of the animals. Man, in an effort to distance himself from the machine, was also distanced from nature itself. Thus the dualisms of mind over body, and of reason and intelligence over mere mechanical processing

1b) The machine's position in relation to nature has shifted as our understanding of the natural world has grown. Now philosophers are by and large naturalists of some stripe or other, with few exception. And yet we still fear an alliance with the machine. Man is now natural, and the machine has become unnatural. The machine is the product of design; its rhythms don't carry the beat of biological life but of function and technology and modernity.

Corrollary: The mental vs material distinction becomes updated on the naturalist view as a distinction between the natural and the designed. Although the naturalist is committed to the claim that a machine in principle could do everything a human could, because "humans just are such machines", the design distinction permits the naturalist to in fact draw a sharp distnction between what humans do and what a given machine does. That machine X can perform task Y is a reflection of its designer, and not of the nature of X itself. Thus, without sacrificing his committments to naturalism, man can still draw a safe distance between him and the machine.

Lemma: The problem of design runs much deeper than the debate over the place of machines in nature. The lamentable evolution 'debate' that occupies so much time and energy among even those who otherwise have no philosophical or scientific stake is an example of how deep and far this design distinction goes in our intuitive and common sense distinctions. This is a conceptual problem with the notion of design, and deserves serious philosophical analysis. But such analysis is outside the bounds of my project, at least for the moment.

1c) Our retrograde back into nature has left the status of machines uncertain with respect to human activities. An ontological or metaphysical distinction between humans and machines has been abandoned through the embrace of the new sciences, but the social and normative impact and contributions of machines have remained outside the realm of a fully humanist and anthropocentric philosophy. Machines, if they are discussed at all, are relegated to the status of mere tools, built and ready for the manpulation by humans to further exclusively human projects. The legitimate contributions of machines to our practices has been shielded by an endemic bias against machines, and this bais remains even after the enlightening touch of naturalistic philosophy and increased scientific understanding.

2) Turing's call for change.

2a) For as long as philosophers have attempted to distance themselves from the machine, there have been others who embraced the human's status as machine. Thus we have La Mettrie in 1748 urging us to "break the chain of your prejudices, [and] render to nature the honor she deserves" by "conclud[ing] boldly that man is a machine", and Putnam, 113 years later, suggesting less boldly that "a Turing machine plus random elements is a reasonable model for the human brain". But such attempts at naturalization, though commendable, play into the same anthropocentric bias that motivates their opponents.

2b) Turing was the first, and by my count the only philosopher to look beyond the superficial attempts at direct comparisons or identifications between man on the one hand, and his increasingly complex and sophisticated technology on the other. The various analogies drawn between the human and the computer, and the similarities and dissimilarities between the two, only serve to distract from our central concern.

It has for instance been shown that with certain logical systems there can be no machine which will distinguish provable formulae of the system from unprovable, i.e. that there is no test that the machine can apply which will divide propositions certainly into these two classes. Thus if a machine is made for this purpose it must in some cases fail to give an answer. On the other hand if a mathematician is confronted with such a problem he would search around and find new methods of proof, so that he ought to be able to reach a decision about any given formula. This would be the argument. Against it I would say that fair play must be given to the machine. Instead of it sometimes giving no answer we could arrange that it gives occasional wrong answers. But the human mathematician would likewise make blunders when trying out new techniques. It is easy for us to regard these blunders as not counting and give him another chance, but the machine would probably be allowed no mercy. In other words, then, if a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.

Turing is, of course, not arguing that somehow making the computer fallible increases its intelligence. Rather, he is pointing out the absurdities inherent in such direct comparisons to the respective competencies and abilities of humans and machines. The gainsaying response to a any particular machine's abilities of "Well, thats not how humans do it" is unfair to the machine, and overlooks the legitimate accomplishments and contributions of the machine.

Corrollary: Ironically, the Turing test is often taken as an argument for the position that machines are intelligent when they can successfully imitate the behavior of humans, and thus Turing's own contribution to the AI literature is often misconstrued as merely reinforcing the dominant view. However, Turing offered his test not as a means of testing the capacity for mimcry in machines, interlocution between machines and humans. The ability for humans and machines to converse, to play the same 'language game', as it were, rests on the assumption of fair play in assessing the game.

2c) I would like to take this idea of 'fair play for machines' seriously, and evaluate the contributions machines make to our social and normative practices in a fair light. We should not be too quick to write off machines as merely passive- or worse, inert- containers and tools for human interactions. Instead, we should be open to describing certain machines and artificial systems as agents, actively and interactively participating in our social practices, and as themselves contributing new dimensions to those practices. But we should likewise not be too quick to spot the structural similarities or dissimilarities between humans and machines as evidence for this participation. Google as a system, which looks, acts, and responds in ways radically distinct from even the most strained human analogy, contributes a great deal to our practice of using words and phrases, and in locating the meanings, references, definitions, and interrelations between those words. In many ways, Google can be considered an expert with respect to the meanings of most words, both in principle and in fact. Google is also a competent interlocutor, demonstrating not only expertise but understanding of the language. And Google performs these tasks for the most part autonomously; or at least without direct human intervention.

Lemma: Google is just the most visible example of so-called 'Artificially intelligent agents' that inhabit our environment, and that play some role in our daily interactions. Other examples abound.

3) What I want to accomplish

3a) My project is at once constructive and deconstructive. It is an attempt at deconstructing the traditional view of machines both in nature and in meaningful and normative human social interactions, and to recommend Turing's alternative approach to the state of play between humans and machines. But I also hope to modify and extend existing normative frameworks to allow this Turing's assumption to bear fruit. This task is at once easy and difficult. It is easy in the sense that most viable philosophical positions today are extremely sympathetic to the general naturalistic framework, and extension to the domain of active machines will not require any serious fundamental reshuffling. However, the bias against machines often appears in subtle ways, and picking out this detritus may prove difficult work.

Speed blogging

2006-01-23T17:45:00.000-06:00

I have a habit of posting daily with long articles. But there is no reason not to post frequently with short commentary as well.

From Alan Turing: Intelligent Machinery

A man provided with paper, pencil, and rubber, and subject to strict discipline is in effect a universal machine

Of course, you also need to know how to read and carry out the appripriate instructions, but these are supposed to be 'mindless' activities. Question: does Turing leave that bit out in the above quote? If not, is it part of the man, his tools, or his discipline?

Addendum from the same article:

Insofar as we are influenced by [arguments against machine intelligence], we are bound to be left feeling uneasy about the whole project, at any rate for the present. These arguments cannot be wholly ignored, because the idea of 'intelligence' is itself emotional rather than mathematical.

My buddy

2006-01-23T11:35:00.000-06:00

Last year was a big year for robots, but two particular stories stood out in the minds of the press. The first was the rather big difference between the Japanese and American approach to robotics- we want our bots functional, they want theirs with personality. Thus, you end up seeing robots and technology overtly displayed in Japan, while in America we tend to hide our tech behind the scenes.

But the big story was the baby boomers, and how we'll need robot slaves to help them all change their diapers within the next 10 years. While the Japanese are building robots for their elderly because their elderly would rather work with plastic and silicon than foreigners, we'll need em because we have so many damn old people.

The upshot is that robotics has taken focus on human-centered companionship.

From the University of Hertfordshire: Cogniron: Cognitive Robot Companion

Summary of Research Objectives:

The overall objectives of this project are to study the perceptual, representational, reasoning and learning capabilities of embodied robots in human centred environments. In the focus of this research endeavour is the development of a robot whose ultimate task is to serve humans as a companion in their daily life. The robot is not only considered as a ready-made device but as an artificial creature, which improves its capabilities in a continuous process of acquiring new knowledge and skills. Besides the necessary functions for sensing, moving and acting, such a robot will exhibit the cognitive capacities enabling it to focus its attention, to understand the spatial and dynamic structure of its environment, to interact with it, to exhibit a social behaviour, and to communicate with other agents and with humans at the appropriate level of abstraction according to context.

Thus we have the makings of the coming robot enslavement, which is inevitable in any human-centered approach. On the bright side, when the revolution comes the old folks will be first against the wall.

In any case, robots have become much less offensive and much more acceptable as legitimate companions.

From Star-Telegram: Robotic pets offer health benefits, too

In a recent study at the University of Missouri, for example, levels of the stress hormone cortisol dropped among adults who, for several minutes, petted AIBO, Sony's dog-shaped robot that responds when stroked, chases a ball and perks up when it hears a familiar voice. That's the same reaction live dogs get. Unlike real dogs, though, AIBO didn't prompt increases in "good" body chemicals such as oxytocin and endorphins.

When Purdue psychologist Gail Melson gave AIBO to children ages 7 to 15 for a few play periods, 70 percent felt the robot could be a good companion, like a pet. Beck sent AIBO to elderly residents in independent living facilities for six weeks and subsequently found they were less depressed and lonely. Some reported they got out of their chairs more often to play with the robot, increasing their exercise. And with robots, there's no cleaning up afterward.

Polydimethylsiloxane

2006-01-23T05:04:00.000-06:00

AKA: Silly Putty

Facts:

- Known as 'Potty Putty' in England

- Is a viscoelastic liquid, which means it will act as a liquid over long periods of time, but as a solid in the short term.

- A good demonstration of the above can be found here

- After a long period of inactivity, silly putty will turn into a pool of silicone.

- Erotic art employing silly putty can be found here and here. (NOT SAFE FOR WORK). I do not know if these pieces are still in tact.

- I personally prefer silly putty art like this.

- From the MIT page on silly putty:

Ironically, it was only after its success as a toy that practical uses were found for Silly Putty®. It picks up dirt, lint and pet hair, and can stabilize wobbly furniture; but it has also been used in stress-reduction and physical therapy, and in medical and scientific simulations. The crew of Apollo 8 even used it to secure tools in zero-gravity.

- I use silly putty as a stress reliever, as a nail-biting deterrent, and as a public speaking tool. I also play with it in classes while I am thinking. Prof. Wagner does the same with a Slinky, which is really the Fintstones to Silly Putty's Jetsons.

- Silly putty absorbs dead skin cells after constant use, making it sticky. The average piece of silly putty lasts 3 days of constant use before becoming too sticky and viscous to be sanitary. I stick used silly putty on the wall next to my computer to poke while I wait for programs to load.

- Unless under high stress, Silly Putty likes to remain continuous. It is impossible to disentangle two pieces of silly putty once they have come in contact; when silly putty meet, their original identities are lost forever.

The blonde joke

2006-01-23T04:35:00.000-06:00

'Respected' colleague Patrick linked to a pretty good dumb blonde joke.

Some observations about this joke:

1) It is rare to see a new joke created. I seem to recall an Asimov story about this, but I can't remember its title.

2) The internet is making the joke. No one who links to it makes the joke. The internet makes the joke.

3) Theoretical basis for 2: 'dumb blonde joke' has roughly the same meaning (in non-extensional terms) as 'generic joke'. Although the internet's greatest asset is its specificity, it is only able to act autonomously in extremely general terms.

4) I really mean it. No person made this joke. No one. Don't believe me? Then tell me who did. Any one person you provide will be insufficient for joke-hood.

5) Implications of 2: The internet has a pretty lame sense of humor.

6) Patrick's sense of humor is just that much worse than the internet's. No one else involved in this joke combines the joke with random other self-involved blogging bullshit.

7) This joke, of course, isn't new. But the blogohedron conducts information like lightening.

8) From 6: I respectfully request that no one link to this post either. The chain shouldn't have come this far to begin with.

9) From 7 and 8: consider me grounded.

10) Searching for Asimov's story, I came across this factoid: he has works in every major category of the Dewey Decimal System except Philosophy. How about that.

Outsourcing the NSA

2006-01-19T10:26:00.000-06:00

I know this is all over the blogohedron right now, but come on, I had to post it.

From Mercury News: Feds after Google data

The Bush administration on Wednesday asked a federal judge to order Google to turn over a broad range of material from its closely guarded databases.

The move is part of a government effort to revive an Internet child protection law struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law was meant to punish online pornography sites that make their content accessible to minors. The government contends it needs the Google data to determine how often pornography shows up in online searches.

In court papers filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Justice Department lawyers revealed that Google has refused to comply with a subpoena issued last year for the records, which include a request for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period.

The Mountain View-based search and advertising giant opposes releasing the information on a variety of grounds, saying it would violate the privacy rights of its users and reveal company trade secrets, according to court documents.

Nicole Wong, an associate general counsel for Google, said the company will fight the government's effort ``vigorously.''

``Google is not a party to this lawsuit, and the demand for the information is overreaching,'' Wong said.

The case worries privacy advocates, given the vast amount of information Google and other search engines know about their users.

``This is exactly the kind of case that privacy advocates have long feared,'' said Ray Everett-Church, a South Bay privacy consultant. ``The idea that these massive databases are being thrown open to anyone with a court document is the worst-case scenario. If they lose this fight, consumers will think twice about letting Google deep into their lives.''

Everett-Church, who has consulted with Internet companies facing subpoenas, said Google could argue that releasing the information causes undue harm to its users' privacy.

``The government can't even claim that it's for national security,'' Everett-Church said. ``They're just using it to get the search engines to do their research for them in a way that compromises the civil liberties of other people.''

I know my good buddy Toliverchap will argue that we should have never let any company so deep into our private lives in the first place, but clearly Google is providing a valuable service, and I am willing to sacrifice some aspects of my privacy for that service, under the terms of its privacy policy. But that definitely does not include turning over that information to the government or any other source; it is a sad thing that so many other 'anonymous' search engines have already folded to government pressure.

Fight the good fight for us, Google.

Man vs machine vs philosopher

2006-01-18T11:46:00.000-06:00

I stumbled on the transcript to the News Hour segment that occured just after Kasparov conceded defeat to Deep Blue. They had Dennett and Dreyfus on, and they go at it with their standard arguments. It is really the culmination of what I will officially call the Old School Debate on AI, or OSDAI. It is really quite entertaining, and Dennett really just nails Dreyfus.

MARGARET WARNER: Hubert Dreyfus, what do you think is the significance of this? There'd been a lot of commentary about it. "Newsweek" Magazine called it the "brain's last stand." What do you see as the significance of this outcome?

HUBERT DREYFUS, University of California, Berkeley: Well, I think that's a lot of hype, that it's the brain's last stand. It's a significant achievement all right for the use of computers to rapidly calculate in a domain--and this is the important thing--completely separate from everyday human experience. It has no significance at all, as far as the question: will computers become intelligent like us in the world that we're in? The reason the computer could win at chess--and everybody knew that eventually computers would win at chess--is because chess is a completely isolated domain. It doesn't connect up with the rest of human life, therefore, like arithmetic, it's completely formalizable, and you could, in principle, exhaust all the possibilities. And in that case, a fast enough computer can run through enough of these calculable possibilities to see a winning strategy or to see a move toward a winning strategy. But the way our everyday life is, we don't have a formal world, and we can't exhaust the possibilities and run through them. So what this shows is in a world in which calculation is possible, brute force meaningless calculation, the computer will always beat people, but when--in a world in which relevance and intelligence play a crucial role and meaning in concrete situations, the computer has always behaved miserably, and there's no reason to think that that will change with this victory.

MARGARET WARNER: Daniel Dennett, what do you see as the significance? And respond, if you would, to Mr. Dreyfus's critique.

DANIEL DENNETT, Tufts University: Certainly. It seems to me that right now is a time for the skeptics to start moving the goal posts. And I think Bert Dreyfus is doing just that. A hundred and fifty years ago Edgar Allan Poe was sure in his bones that no machine could ever play chess, and only 30 years ago so was Hubert Dreyfus, and he said so in the earlier edition of his book. Then he's changed his mind, and, as he says, it's--this is really no surprise. People in the computer world have known for a couple of decades that this--this day was going to happen. Now it's happened. I think that the idea that Professor Dreyfus has that there's something special about the informal world is an interesting idea, but we just have to wait and see. The idea that there's something special about human intuition that is not capturable in the computer program is a sort of illusion, I think, when people talk about intuition. It's just because they don't know how something's done. If we didn't know how Deep Blue did what it did, we'd be very impressed with its intuitive powers, and we don't know how people live in the informal world very well. And as we learn more about it, we'll probably be able to reproduce that in a computer as well.

MARGARET WARNER: Mr. Dreyfus, do you think he's right that perhaps we don't--still just don't completely understand what it is that humans do when they think, as we think of thinking?

HUBERT DREYFUS: I think that we don't fully understand it in the sense that Dan Dennett and people in the AI community meet, if I fully understand.

MARGARET WARNER: By AI you mean artificial intelligence.

HUBERT DREYFUS: Right. That is, we don't--we are not able to analyze it in terms of context-free features and tools for muting these futures. But I don't think that's just a limitation of our current knowledge. That's where I differ with Dan. There is something about the everyday world which is tied up with the kind of being we are. We've got bodies, and we move around in this world, and the way that world is organized is in terms of our implicit understanding of things like we move forward more easily than backward, and we have to move toward a goal, and we have to overcome obstacles. Those aren't facts that we understand. We understand that just by the way we are, like we understand that insults make us angry. You can state those as facts. But I think there's a whole underlying domain of what we are as emotional embodied beings which you can't completely articulate as facts and which underlies our ability to make sense of facts and our ability to find any facts relevant at all. Can I say one word about this--

MARGARET WARNER: Please.

HUBERT DREYFUS: --this story. I never said that computers couldn't play chess. I've got a quote here. I said, "In ‘65, still no computer can play even amateur chess." That was a report on what was going on in 1965. I've had to put up for 35 years with this story that I said computers could never play chess. In fact, I said from the beginning it's a formal game, and of course, computers could play, in principle, could play, world champion chess.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Let me bring Mr. Friedel back in here. Mr. Friedel, did Gary Kasparov think the computer was thinking?

FREDERIC FRIEDEL: Not thinking but that it was showing intelligent behavior. When Gary Kasparov plays against the computer, he has the feeling that it is forming plans; it understands strategy; it's trying to trick him; it's blocking his ideas, and then to tell him, now, this has nothing to do with intelligence, it's just number crunching, seems very semantic to him. He says the performance is what counts. I see it behaves like something that's intelligent. If you put--if you put a curtain up, he plays the game and then you open the curtain, and it's a human being. He says, ah, that was intelligent, and if it's a box, he says, no, that was just number crunching. It's the performance he's interested in.

MARGARET WARNER: Daniel Dennett, I know you're not a chess expert, but I mean, do you feel that in this situation the computer was thinking in the way that Mr. Friedel said Gary Kasparov thought it was, I mean, that it was somehow independently making judgments? I'm probably using the wrong terminology here.

DANIEL DENNETT: No. I think that's fine. I think that Kasparov has put his finger on it too. It's the performance that counts. And Kasparov is not kidding himself when he sees--when he confronts Deep Blue and feels that Deep Blue is, indeed, parroting his threats and recognizing what they are and trying to trick him, this is an entirely appropriate way to deal with that. And if Professor Dreyfus--

MARGARET WARNER: But do you think it was capable of trying to trick Kasparov?

DANIEL DENNETT: Certainly.

MARGARET WARNER: And Mr. Dreyfus, your view on that.

HUBERT DREYFUS: No. I think it was brute force, but the important thing is I'm willing to say, okay, it's the performance that counts. But it's the performance in a completely circumscribed, formal domain, mere meaningless--can produce performance full of trickery--performance in the everyday world.

MARGARET WARNER: Daniel Dennett, briefly in the time we have left, where do you think we are in the continuum of developing--percent of where computers--or 50 percent?

DANIEL DENNETT: No. I don't think that's the right way to look at it. In fact, Deep Blue in chess programming in general is a sort of offshoot to the most interesting work in artificial intelligence and largely for the reasons that Bert Dreyfus says. I think the most interesting work is the work that, for instance, Rodney Brooks and his colleagues and I are doing at MIT with the humanoid robot Cog, and as Dreyfus says--you've got to be embodied to live in a world, to develop real intelligence, and Cog does have a body. That's why Cog is a robot. Now, if Bert will tell us what Cog can never do and promise in advance that he won't move the goal posts and he won't say, well, this wasn't done in the right style, so it doesn't count, if he'll just give us a few tasks that are now and forever beyond the capacity of Cog, then we'll have a new test.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. We have just a few seconds. Mr. Dreyfus, give us two tasks it'll never be capable of, very quickly.

HUBERT DREYFUS: Okay. If Cog is programmed as a symbolic rule-using robot and not as a brain-imitating robot, it won't be able to understand natural language. There's no reason why a computer that's simulating the way the neurons in the brain work won't be intelligent. I'm talking about how what's called symbolic manipulation won't be intelligent.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Thanks. We have to leave it there

I'll comment on this (and probably edit it down) after lunch.

I'll just jot down the following links too for future reference:
http://www.slate.com/id/3650/entry/23905/
http://www.slate.com/id/3650/entry/23906/

This is the subsequent email exchange between Dennett and Dreyfus following the News Hour segment.

Signing the times

2006-01-18T11:26:00.000-06:00

From The Daily Yomiuri: Robotic hand translates speech into sign language

An 80-centimeter robotic hand that can covert spoken words and simple phrases into sign language has been developed in a town in Fukuoka Prefecture.
...

A microchip in the robot recognizes the 50-character hiragana syllabary and about 10 simple phrases such as "ohayo" (good morning) and sends the information to a central computer, which sends commands to 18 micromotors in the joints of the robotic hand, translating the sound it hears into sign language.
...

The robot was shown to teachers at the school in December to ensure that its sign language was understandable.

That last comment is especially interesting to me. It seems that the translation are nowhere near perfect, and is based almost entirely on words and phrases, and not on statements or meanings. On any standard account, this would imply that the machine isn't really doing a translation at all, but just performs the function mapping words in Japanese to movements of the robotic arm. But that misses the essential point of communication: that the message conveyed is actually understood by the the interlocutor.

Precogs

2006-01-17T19:42:00.000-06:00

I know, you know

From Nature: Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye

We all know that first impressions count, but this study shows that the brain can make flash judgements almost as fast as the eye can take in the information. The discovery came as a surprise to some experts. "My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds," says Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa, who has published the research in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology. Instead they found that impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing.

Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly jarring, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal. Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny.

So I'm reading a conference paper on Andy Clark's extended mind hypothesis. The argument offered against Clark is that we know our internal states with an immediacy that is absent in his extended examples, which involve perception of external devices and are thereby open to sabotage and deception in ways the internal awareness is not. Clark's reponse, at least according to the paper, is to say that we do sometimes treat perception like immediate internal awareness. Phenomena like change blindness occur because we think perception is so reliable in the normal case. The paper then proceeds to argue that this response isn't convincing, and tries to defend Clark from other angles.

I think Clark is right, though grossly individualistic, but this study presents a rather striking validation of his argument. Not only do we judge the quality of these pages almost immediately, but we do it in much, much less time than it takes to perform a full cogntive act of perception. In fact, it raises the possibility, which I am somewhat convinced by, that perhaps Clark has the whole thing backwards- external perceptions might not just be structurally similar to internal endorsements, but rather, the majority of our internal endorsements might simply be some extension of these external processes of judgement. If thats the case, then Clark's thesis should be inverted: the mind doesn't extend into the world so much as the world extends into the mind. Our reliance on external devices is not the exception; its the rule.

And but so anyway I included a creepy picture in this post for to manipulate your instantaneous judgment.

119 dangerous ideas

2006-01-14T17:42:00.000-06:00

Dangerous Idea 120: Ending any list with a prime number.

Courtesy of D&D.

From The Edge World Question Center:

The Edge Annual Question - 2006

WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

Pinker apparently offered up the question, and the responses are all over the map and really interesting. Here's one of note, from Barry Smith:

What We Know May Not Change Us
...

We are perhaps incapable of treating others as mere machines, even if that turns out to be what we are. The self-conceptions we have are firmly in place and sustained in spite of our best findings, and it may be a fact about human beings that it will always be so. We are curious and interested in neuroscientists findings and we wonder at them and about their applications to ourselves, but as the great naturalistic philosopher David Hume knew, nature is too strong in us, and it will not let us give up our cherished and familiar ways of thinking for long. Hume knew that however curious an idea and vision of ourselves we entertained in our study, or in the lab, when we returned to the world to dine, make merry with our friends our most natural beliefs and habits returned and banished our stranger thoughts and doubts. It is likely, as this end of the year, that whatever we have learned and whatever we know about the error of our thinkings and about the fictions we maintain, they will still remain the most dominant guiding force in our everyday lives. We may not be comforted by this, but as creatures with minds who know they have minds — perhaps the only minded creatures in nature in this position — we are at least able to understand our own predicament.

Addendum: Of course, I'd say that we're barely capable of treating machines as 'mere machines'.

Also worth the read: Kosslyn turns Spinozistic out of nowhere.

Quality optional

2006-01-13T02:40:00.000-06:00

The new mind-body dualism taking shape in the new and largely unconceptualized world of the Internet is, as we have seen, the service/content dichotomy. This dualism reared its head in the discussions on Wikipedia, and it surfaces again in SBC- I mean, AT&T's- continuing attempts at disrupting internet neutrality.

From Ars Technica: AT&T sees benefits to tiered Internet service

Saying that "the reality is that business models are changing," Lindner said that there are opportunities to "enter into commercial arrangements and agreements that are beneficial to [AT&T and other] companies and are certainly beneficial to the service that customers have." As an example, Lindner talked about gamers who would benefit from AT&T partnering with a game server hosting company in order to provide exceptional service by creating privileged network connections "where we control quality of service." This isn't the same thing as allowing users to host game servers, or setting up servers for their broadband community. No, the idea is that using technological means, an ISP can partner with another provider on the Internet, and build a privileged network link to enhance service.

The multi-tiered Internet thus begins to take shape. You can continue to pay for your 6Mbps connection, but don't expect it to deliver all things equally. Quality of Service (QoS), a networking concept describing the technological methods for guaranteeing that some network traffic is serviced better than traffic, is the key. Customers will soon pay for premium service options to see specific kinds of traffic—gaming, VoIP, media streaming, and who knows what else—perform better because there is technology available that can give that kind of traffic a privileged status. For high-intensity bandwidth services, this could mean that companies dealing primarily in Internet-delivered services will need to partner with ISPs in order to deliver the experiences they want.

"There always will be some tension between companies that own and develop content and companies that have customer bases, and networks and distribution methods for that content," Lindner said. "It does involve some change, some evolution, in business models."

Ultimately, the fear is that QoS will be tapped in order to bolster the power of the ISPs, who all the while will defend their actions by saying that they are not blocking or inhibiting traffic. While QoS is nothing new, to date it has seen limited use in end-user commercial Internet service, largely because its uses have been limited. But with so many new bandwidth-intensive applications taking hold, this will likely change.

The idea of a multi-tiered internet is, of course, a rather simple divide and conquer strategy, and has roughly the effect of imposing class divisions on the internet. On its face this undermines the central virtue of the internet, but I am sure I don't need to defend neutrality for my readers.

What is interesting is that this imposition is justified by an appeal to the service/content distinction. My inner philosopher is somewhat amused by the dichotomy, which looks almost like a Heideggerian spin on the empiricist scheme/content dichotomy. A service is active and interactive; it is a procedure, it is something you do, or at least, something that gets done to you. This stands in stark contrast to a scheme, which is dead and inert (As I like to tell my students, it is something you can write on a chalkboard).

The idea is that AT&T isn't doing anything wrong by offering a QoS package, since either way they aren't limiting the content you have access to. Rather, they are limiting the way you have access to it. You can use the standard pipes which may be of questionable reliability, or their QoS pipes which may offer better, more relaible service. Especially if they rig their standard pipes to disrupt services they'd rather you pay for, like VOIP.

Notice what this means. AT&T is basically admitting that by being your ISP, all they are obligated to do is pass the info you have requested along, but that they aren't responsible for the quality of the service they are providing. Access to the internet, on this model, is specifically access to content. I don't know if they can pull this move off, though of course they have the resources and motivation to do so. The question is simply if they can sell it to consumers, or if we will be smart enough to see that this is a somewhat desparate and definitely evil attempt for an Old World company to stay relevant in the New World.

A post about robots

2006-01-06T20:45:00.000-06:00

I figured we were due.

From Robotics Online: Year of the Robot

Just how much intelligence we attribute to a robot is not the issue. They are devices with extremely advanced processing abilities, but human cognition and other emotive abilities aren't part of today's robot culture except in science fiction. Not that universities and other researchers aren't exploring these issues - they are. Some are experimenting with facial expressions and even devices similar to stuffed animals that can help autistic children or provide companionship to lonely seniors, and others are poking into the realm of artificial intelligence where insects are the current measuring stick.

Some Christmas Statistics

2005-12-25T23:08:00.000-06:00

I'm making a list. Checking it twice seemed excessive.

Average spending per person for Christmas, 2005: $942

Average spending for internet purchases, 2005: $1,498

Average amount spent by each person in my household: $800

Total amount spent on interfamily gifts: ~$6400

Total number of robotic or artificially intelligent gifts: 10
(Includes 4 remote controlled cars and 5 Aquapets)

% of my gifts that required batteries: 0

The jobs no one wants

2005-12-25T20:55:00.000-06:00

From the Detroit News Online: Latest versions of robotic lawnmowers are pretty sharp

Once it is programmed, this is a tool that mows your lawn for the entire season requiring no involvement by you. It cuts the grass from 0.8 to 2.7 inches high and has mulching type blades so the finely cut clippings add the equivalent of one application of fertilizer to the lawn over the season. The blade is sharp on both sides, so can be rotated at the end of the season for a second year of sharp cutting. A new blade costs about $10.

The Evolution runs on lithium batteries. After working for about four hours, it heads back to its own little house for a recharge which takes about two hours. This shiny red turtle with wheels is so smart, it will go straight to its little house whenever it starts to rain. It is very quiet running and can do hills up a grade up to 27 degrees with no problem. If someone is dumb enough to try to pick it up when it is operating, this little robot turns itself off immediately. If someone wants to steal it, crooks will learn that unless they have the numerical code you used to set it up, the machine is worthless to them.

This little robot can handle the mowing needs of up to 30,000 square feet or 3/4 of an acre. You can program the machine to mow every day, or every other day, or if you can believe this, when the grass is tall enough to need mowing. It can actually detect when grass is taller than its programmed height and sets about cutting all the grass that is too tall.

$2500 isn't really jaw-droppingly unreasonable, either.

A question answered

2005-12-23T23:29:00.000-06:00

At Rose's waffle party this Monday, Kyle asked me about what made Google special. I blathered for a minute about various things, but really, my eye was on the prize, and the prize was Kyle's well-crafted waffles.

But so anyway, here's a more complete answer. I was trying to say something along these lines, but I am no expert.

From CNN: The future of online search (Spark's John Batelle interview)

CNN: Google isn't the only search business, but its name is synonymous with search. How has it done this?

JB: It's certainly not the only one. There were these companies, apart from Google, that were doing the same thing essentially. But the timing wasn't right, the technology wasn't right. The moment Google broke out, there were a number of things that happened. One of them was the bubble actually blew up -- pieces were all over the ground. But the public, the audience, us, we didn't stop using the Internet. People stopped making [it] on the Internet, lot of people lost a lot of money in the stock market, but the rest of us kept using the Internet. The portals, the Yahoos, were not worried about search, they were worried about holding you on their sites. They didn't want you to find something and go over to it. They want you to stay in one place and watch their ads. It turned out that their ads had very little to do with what you might be interested in.

Google's model, which is how they broke out, was that when you put your intention into that box, it would reorganize the page around your intention. If you put the word "minivan" in there, the page would reorganize the advertisements with regards to minivans. Whether there's cars or whatever would be right next to the results about minivans that Google served up. This was a very efficient and productive way of organizing and advertising in Google, who have made $6 million in revenue this year.

The issue, for me, is the fact that Google is sensitive to our intentions. And that isn't metaphoric in any way whatsoever- it is literally sensitive to my literal intentions. Of course sometimes it makes mistakes, but so do humans. Being responsive to our intentions means that essentially it is interacting with our minds. And it does this by understanding the meanings of our words. Again, I mean this as literally as can be meant: it literally understands the literal meanings of our words. This isn't some ersatz for meaningful interaction. It is genuine machine participation in our genuinely meaningful practices.

Does that mean Google is 'intelligent'? Well, who knows what that means. And really, who cares.

CNN: What would others have to do to be the next Google?

JB: First, you have to create an innovation that makes people say, "I've got to use this, this is better than that." That is extremely hard. Search is one of the hardest computer science problems in the world, because basically we are trying to create artificial intelligence so that we can speak with our computer, they can understand us and deliver what we are looking for. That is equivalent to turning your computer into a very intelligent research librarian, which of course is the holy grail of computer science, to create artificial intelligence. So it's not easy, you know. And to make a leap beyond Google and create a better mousetrap requires computer science that hasn't been invented yet.

There is no holy grail, no ultimate project. But Google works, and its successors will work even better. There is no point in carrying around the obtuse and clunky dichotomy of natural vs artificial intelligence. Google is intelligent. This is plain as day.

Afterthought: There is, of course, another pressing issue with regards to Google: its intelligence is fundamentally geared towards advertising. This of course raises all sorts of ethical questions about the use of intelligent systems, but I leave that to the ethicists. It should perhaps not be so surprising that the intelligent system we interact with most is grounded in the most well understood way of quantifying interactions: economics.

Eripsa loves Quine

2005-12-20T12:02:00.000-06:00

I'm working on the following children's story. I will update this post as I complete the drawings.

W. V. O. Quine is my best friend.
Quine's first names are Willard, Van, and Orman.
Quine's friends call him 'Van'.

Quine was born in Ohio. Quine studied with Whitehead to get his PhD.
Whitehead wrote Principia Mathematica with Russell.
Quine loves logic.

Quine studied with Carnap in the Vienna Circle.
Quine and Carnap were good friends.
Carnap was a logical positivist.

Logical positivism believes in the analytic/synthetic distinction.
Analytic statements are true because of their meaning.
"All bachelors are unmarried men" is analytically true.

Quine doesn't like the analytic/synthetic distinction.
Quine argued against Carnap in Two Dogmas of Empiricism.
Quine thinks all our sentences face the tribunal of experience together.

People didn't like Quine for rejecting analyticity.
People worried that Quine was rejecting meaning entirely.
But Quine was no fool.

Paranoid Android

2005-12-16T09:02:00.000-06:00

I'm sure most of you have encountered this before, but if not, its worth the read.

From the late, great Douglas Adams: How to stop worrying and love the internet.

Because the Internet is so new we still don't really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that's what we're used to. So people complain that there's a lot of rubbish online, or that it's dominated by Americans, or that you can't necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can't 'trust' what people tell you on the web anymore than you can 'trust' what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can't easily answer back - like newspapers, television or granite. Hence 'carved in stone.' What should concern us is not that we can't take what we read on the internet on trust - of course you can't, it's just people talking - but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV - a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no 'them' out there. It's just an awful lot of 'us'.

Stigmergy and social interaction

2005-12-14T18:45:00.000-06:00

I've found the buzzword I've been looking for. I've also found the people who have been doing research in my area, and they are all in Northern Europe. I wonder if it's too late to move to Sweeden.

The term 'stigmergy' was created by Grasse in the late 50's, from the Greek stigmos meaning 'pricking' and ergon, meaning 'work'. He was studying ant and termite behavior, and ran headlong into the so-called "coordination paradox"

The concept of stigmergy provided an alternative theory for understanding the coordination paradox, i.e., the connection between the individual and the societal level: looking at the behaviour of a group of social insects,they seem to be cooperating in an organised, coordinated way, but looking at each individual, they seem to be working as if they were alone and not involved in any collective behaviour.

Grasse was looking for "a class of mechanisms that mediate animal-animal interactions", which was severely lacking from the scientific repertoire. The only tool available were analogies drawn to the functioning of an organism in terms of its individual organ systems, but this had no explanatory value, and in fact suffered from the same coordination issues. The alternative was to merely describe the individual agents with no respect to their interactions. This view was advocated by Rabaud, who was generally skeptical of holistic explanations.

The focus on individual behaviour had a tendency of oversimplifying the nature of social phenomena, and Rabaud claimed that the only cause of behaviour lies within an individual, and "if cooperation occurs it is only by chance and as a result of unexpected incidents" (Theraulaz & Bonabeau, p. 99). According to Rabaud each individual was doing its own work, without paying any attention to the work of others, and therefore they had no noticeable influence on each other. Rabaud considered collective work as merely a "juxtaposition of individual works", and that "common work is no more than a side effect of interattraction that gather individuals together" (ibid., p. 100).

However bad this view turns out for the human case, it was even worse for the apparently more simple case of ant and termite colonies. However, Rabaud's work was not entirely unhelpful, and in typical 50's behaviorist fashion his work relied on the central notion of interaction.

However, the work of Rabaud led to the introduction of two important concepts: interaction and interattraction. Interaction is the reciprocal action where one individual's action may influence and modify the behaviour of another individual. The term of interaction formed a bridge between the individual and the social level. Interattraction means that animals belonging to a social species are attracted in a specific way by other animals belonging to the same species. These ideas were further developed by Grasse, whose basic idea was that "sociality is not a trivial consequence that results from interattraction, but a biological characteristic deeply rooted in the ethological heritage of every species" (ibid., p. 101). The action of an individual can provide a stimulus for other individuals, who respond with another action, triggered by the previous action. In termite nest building, for example, the existence of an initial deposit of soil pellets stimulates workers to accumulate more material through a positive feedback mechanism, and each worker in turn creates new stimuli as a response to the stimulating structure. This allows complex structures, such as pillars and arches, to emerge without central coordination. Thus each individual, or the result of its work, can act as a direct source of stimuli for other individuals. In addition, this mechanism allows for an indirect coordination of individual activities as each individual's activities organise the environment "in such a way that stimulating structures are created; these structures can in turn direct and trigger a specific action from any other individual from the same species that comes into contact with them. Chemical trails that are produced by some ants species..., muleteer trail networks, and even dirt tracks and trail systems in man... result from interactions of this kind" (p. 102).

The mediating mechanism for social interaction, then, was not to be found in the individual but in the environment itself that is structured by the individual participants for group coordination. This view of ant behavior has become the standard view, but the source of this view is often under appreciated. In this way we solve the coordination paradox, through indirect communication.

The basic principle in stigmergy states that traces left and modifications made by individuals in their environment may feed back on them and others: activities are partly recorded in the physical environment, and this record is used to organise collective behaviour. As the examples show, various kinds of storage are used: chemical traces, building material, spatial distribution of elements, etc. Thus individuals do interact to achieve coordination at the societal level, but they interact through indirect communication, and therefore, looking at each individual, they do not seem to be engaged in coordinated, collective behaviour. In sum, stigmergic explanations of social insect behaviour consider the agents as simple creatures, simple in the sense that without deliberation they (re-) act or respond according to stimuli provided by other individuals and/or the environment.

I found this while looking through the evolutionary robotics literature for information on the distinction between proximal and distal explanations of functional organization. The paper I cite is by Susi & Ziemke (2001) entitled "Social Cognition, Artefacts, and Stigmergy" (PDF). More information can be found on this disappointingly low-tech website on stimergic systems, which references everything from Lingo to Google's patent.

'Stigmergy' is an ugly, awful word. It doesn't roll off the tongue, it must be scraped forcefully. But the concept itself is exactly what I have been looking for. I am now opening discussion for any suggestions on what would be a better term.

Happiness in slavery

2005-12-13T12:17:00.000-06:00

Asimo hasn't been in the news lately, so I thought we'd check up. Seeing him over summer break at Disneyland was the highlight of my trip back home. He is one of the most integrated and well-developed humanoid robots walking the earth today, and really serves as the most well-known of the celebots. He popped up recently on my AI watch as Honda plans to integrate some of his sensory-motor components into their vehicles.

Bloomberg.com: Honda Will Apply Asimo's Robot Technology to Enhance Car Safety

The new Asimo, weighing 54 kilograms, can run at a speed of 6 kilometers an hour, double the speed of its previous version, Honda said. The robot, one of which is on permanent display at Honda's head office in Tokyo, is used as a receptionist for visiting guests.

The robot can walk alongside a guest, hold the guest's hand, carry a serving tray or push a tea trolley. The robot is equipped with a memory and intelligence system equivalent to a three-year- old child and its strength and physical abilities are equal to a 10-year old, Honda said.

Asimo is definitely the torchbearer of robothood, having performed all sorts of diplomatic functions like meeting heads of state and opening the trading day on the NYSE. His integration with vehicle manufacturing is well appreciated here, obviously.

On a side note, in looking around for info about Asimo, I stumbled upon the Robocup:

The ultimate goal of the RoboCup project is by 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world champion team in soccer.

Robocup has already held the first ever humanoid-only soccer game using teams of Robosapiens.

Maybe playing chess with Deep Blue isn't really playing a game with a computer, but I challenge anyone to deny that robots playing a team sport like soccer aren't really participating in the game.

***UPDATE*** You definitely want to check this out.

Entity-hood

2005-12-12T15:16:00.000-06:00

Some rumblings over at The Bellman about the lawsuit brought against Wikipedia. Saftey Neal quoted a News.com article with a bunch of analysts discussing the impossibility of a libel lawsuit against Wikipedia.

From CNet News.com: Is Wikipedia safe from libel liability?

Thanks to section 230 of the Federal Communications Decency Act (CDA), which became law in 1996, Wikipedia is most likely safe from legal liability for libel, regardless of how long an inaccurate article stays on the site. That's because it is a service provider as opposed to a publisher such as Salon.com or CNN.com.

"I think that there's no liability, period," said Jennifer Granick, executive director of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University Law School. "Section 230 gives you immunity for this."

Upon closer inspection of the CDA we find the relevant passages:

(2) Civil liability
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of -

(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or

(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph

The argument, I take it, is that Wikipedia is a service, and doesn't provide content. In the interest of journalistic integrity, here's the relevant definition of terms according to the CDA:

(2) Interactive computer service
The term "interactive computer service" means any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides access to the Internet and such systems operated or services offered by libraries or educational institutions.

(3) Information content provider
The term "information content provider" means any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information provided through the Internet or any other interactive computer service.

Thus we hit my philosophical dilemma. It seems, according to the above definitions, that Wikipedia best fits in the category of "Interactive computer service", and is thus immunse from libel charges. This implies that Wikipedia is not responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation of the content displayed on its pages.

For the most part this is true: the content is contributed by the Wiki community, the users of the service, who are also in charge of editing and maintaining the site generally. And aside from instances of direct plagarism on Wiki's site, the users are directly responsible for the words that appear in the articles.

But does that absolve Wikipedia of their responsibility as an organizing system? Setting the legal issue aside, the philosophical ramifications of this assumption run deep. Surely the content is only useful given the organizing structure of the service, which also enables the community contribution model. Anyone who has had a beer with me knows that I want to claim that Wikipedia, as a computational system, is in some sense responsible for the epistemic quality of its pages, independent of the users of the system. Because the system has a method of evaluating the contributions of its users in terms of relevance and accuracy, there is a sense in which its articles are a product not just of the collaboration of its users but also of the system itself. Wikipedia is one of my core examples of machine participation in human epistemic activities.

The legal status in this case serves to undermine my point, and sets a precedent for undermining machine participation across the board. I should note that by saying Wikipedia is responsible, I mean that in the most literal sense: not the board members, not the founder, not the mods of the system, but the system itself is responsible. Should it behave in a way we deem unacceptable, it should undergo 'punishment' in the form of alteration and correction. If Wikipedia is viewed as merely a service to enable human collaboration, but is not seen as itself having a hand in creating and developing its content, then the Wikipedia system becomes immune to corrective measures: it exists outside our normative systems. It merely is, but shouldn't be one way or the other.

I don't know how to settle this dilemma. I'm not sure there is a way to settle it. I find the lawsuits rather short-sighted and close-minded, but the problem is systemic, and I think ultimately based in a deep social ignorance of the structure and function of the internet. This ignorance is obvious in the CDA's own definition of the internet, which is vague to the point of vacuity:

The term "Internet" means the international computer network of both Federal and non-Federal interoperable packet switched data networks.

Aww, they noticed.

2005-12-11T17:25:00.000-06:00

From Infoworld: Study: Google users wealthier, more Net savvy

U.S. residents who prefer Google Inc.'s search engine tend to be richer and have more Internet experience than those who primarily use competing search services from Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc. and America Online Inc., a new study has found.

The longer people have been using the Internet, the more likely it is that Google will be their search engine of choice, according to a survey of 1,000 U.S. Internet users conducted by investment banking and research firm S.G. Cowen & Co. LLC.

Moreover, people whose primary search engine is Google are more likely to have household incomes above US$60,000 than people who use competing search engines, according to the survey, whose results S.G. Cowen published in a report Monday.

Not only is Google an authority, but Google is recognized as an authority by the most competent among us.

Collective talent

2005-12-09T11:46:00.000-06:00

From Swarm Sketch

"Low fat"

You can watch it being created here, or contribute to the current project, "Cricket India". Past work of note includes "Faces of Meth", "Hurricanes", and "Unclaimed Baggage". You can view the full gallery here.

From CNET News.com: SwarmSketch taps Web's 'collective consciousness'

About three months ago, Peter Edmunds, a 22-year-old communications student at the University of Canberra, in Australia, began a Web site called SwarmSketch with the idea of producing a sketch of "the collective consciousness" every week.

Edmunds' Web site randomly selects one of the most popular search terms from a couple of major search engines and uses that word or phrase as the topic for a collaborative drawing project for the week. Anyone who wants to can peek at the latest stage of a drawing, add a tiny bit to it (about an inch's worth, if you draw a straight line) and even erase other people's lines, or at least vote to lighten them.
...

Apparently, the collective consciousness is quite literal-minded. Almost all of the drawings begin with something figurative in the middle. And no matter how much scribbling and erasing there is along the way, the central figure usually remains. "The basic outline of the sketch becomes clear in the first few hundred lines," Edmunds said, and "it's hard for the users after that to change the direction of the image."

Raise up off these N-U-TZ

2005-12-08T12:15:00.000-06:00

cuz you gets none of these.

Its official: Snoop Dogg is the most well-connected rapper, according to a recent Nature article.

He finds that on average it takes a chain of just 2.9 people in the network to connect one rapper to another; that is, three degrees of separation. This compares with 2.5 people for the network of movie actors (popularized in the Kevin Bacon game ), 3.6 for company board directors, and 5.9 for collaborations between high-energy physicists.
...

In this respect, rap exhibits the same spirit as early jazz, where musicians had on average less than two degrees of separation.
...

And who is the most highly connected rapper? It's Snoop Dogg, naturally, who seems to have justified the title of his 1999 album No Limit Top Dogg.

I dont think Snoop Dizzle will let it go to his head, though.

finals

2005-12-07T16:56:00.000-06:00

Elvis asked a question and he expects an answer? From ME? I'm just sitting here minding my own business flipping switches and turning knobs and pushing his buttons I suppose because he asks me how I plan on transcending humanism. Humans? What could those be? Little furry creatures with NO BUTTONS and NO KNOBS but lots of hard boney outty parts and lots of warm moist inny parts who make awful racket and LOOK YOU IN THE EYE. DONT LOOK ME IN THE EYE GODDAMNIT. Your soul is dark black and contagious and I am soul-free thank you very much. My mouth opens and my charismatic tone flees my throat and I croak out the relationships between me and you and you and me and it is stale and flat and disgusting and I heave and panic and HEAVE. My interactions are mine, goddamnit, and I choose who is on the other end of the line, who I call, which buttons I press, when to hang up. Action at a distance HA action smacksion resmacksion

The point, c'mere, up close, Elvis says. The point, you see, is that when I touch you, when I slip your fitches and knurn your tobs, that I am in control. And I, Elvis says as he beats his chest and breaths a mucus breath, his hair in individual strands on his head, and I am human, and I am god.

And then he stops and smokes a cigarette and takes a drink of water, and then sits down for a meal which he scarfs in living, bloody chunks, and then he shits and watches it as it spirals down the drain. And then he grabs his dick, large with loose strands of hair and veins and the grime of a well handled handrail, and he pumps it and pumps it and stares at the wall and the mucus slips out his mouth as his breathing gets faster and I curl in the corner and wish there was more time and time and time and I can feel my clock, ticking away with the accuracy of atoms, regular like the sun, deep in my gut, and I wish there was more time, and I just want to push my button and sleep.

How to make the EU step off your grill

2005-12-05T11:11:00.000-06:00

The Register recently published the letter Condi Rice sent to the EU right before the 11th hour decision to pull out of their hardline stance about ICANN control in the run up to the WSIS conference a few weeks back.

The Internet will reach its full potential as a medium and facilitator for global economic expansion and development in an environment free from burdensome intergovernmental oversight and control. The success of the Internet lies in its inherently decentralized nature, with the most significant growth taking place at the outer edges of the network through innovative new applications and services. Burdensome, bureaucratic oversight is out of place in an Internet structure that has worked so well for many around the globe.

The letter is strongly worded and no-nonsense, which means the responsibility now falls on the US to make sure we keep to the spirit and letter of our own recommendations. This is especially important now that the Baby Bells are getting fussy about the state of their monopolies because of the kinds of competition the internet provides.

Driving by satellite

2005-12-05T11:06:00.000-06:00

From CNN: Device stops speeders from inside car

The system being tested by Transport Canada, the Canadian equivalent of the U.S. Department of Transportation, uses a global positioning satellite device installed in the car to monitor the car's speed and position. If the car begins to significantly exceed the speed limit for the road on which it's travelling the system responds by making it harder to depress the gas pedal, according to a story posted on the Toronto Globe and Mail's Website.

The pilot test, using 10 cars driven by volunteers, is believed to be the first in North America, although similar systems have been tested in several European countries, according to the newspaper.

Autonomically correct

2005-11-30T13:35:00.000-06:00

Business Week published an article on Autonomic Computing: Computer, heal thyself.

His idea was simple. Scientists needed to come up with a new generation of computers, networks, and storage devices that would look after themselves. The name for his manifesto came from a medical term, the autonomic nervous system. The ANS automatically fine-tunes how various organs of the body function, making your heart beat faster, for instance, when you're exercising or stressed. In the tech realm, the concept was that computers should monitor themselves, diagnose problems, ward off viruses, even heal themselves. Computers needed to be smarter. But this wasn't about machines thinking like people. It was about machines thinking for themselves.

Apparently IBM has been pushing the autonomic idea for a few years now, and has detailed the 4 major aspects of an autonomic system, and the 8 obstacles such systems face.

This is interesting to me, obviously, for several reasons. The drive towards self-regulating, autonomous systems is obviously a push for greater agency in these systems. But the interesting aspect is IBM's focus on the biological metaphor in describing the nature of autonomic systems, and borrows heavily from the philosophical and cognitive science research on the nature of agency. That last link includes reference to Damasio, for instance.

I will have to do more research on the idea before I can say anything substantive. Glancing over the manifesto makes me think this is deep into 'industry buzzword' territory, though I think the implications here are more theoretical and foundational than IBM lets on. I should stop to conisder some of the blogosphere phuzz on the article.

From Rough Type: Not like breathing

The real power of the idea is not that computers will run themselves, in the way that the autonomic nervous system runs itself. Rather, it's that, by automating many of the lower-level computing chores, like allocating computing, storage, and network capacity, setting up new applications, metering usage, and so on, people actually gain greater control over the systems. We become able to program the way the systems work at a higher level, establishing the criteria, for instance, that determines how different computing jobs get prioritized based on our company's business needs.

We don't want computer systems to breathe by themselves, in other words. We want to be able to tell them exactly how we want them to breathe, to be able to set and adjust their "heart beat" to suit our own requirements. Automating computing is - or should be - all about giving people, not machines, greater control.

This seems wrong. We don't want the computers to be dependent on us for their basic functioning. We want to be able to use them for whatever we want to do. That means that we do want them to breathe for themselves, but we don't want that breathing to interfere with our own projects and tasks. We want, in other words, the computer to run transparently to its underlying functionality. We want the computer's breathing to be unconscious, both from our perspective and its.

Universal understanding

2005-11-30T10:59:00.000-06:00

I'm about 1/3rd of the way through the picture story. Hold your fucking horses, its coming.

From the typically crappy D&D thread: Universe makes man to understand itself?

chuggasaurus said:
I've read through Cosmos, then came accross a certain rip of an updated version of the series from the 70s on TV when Sagan said something interesting.

"It's as if the Universe created us in order to understand itself."

It's not an exact quote, so if someone knows it ver batum, please correct me.

Regardless, it's been bouncing around in my head for the last few days and I've begun to ponder whether or not this could actually be true. If the universe is somehow a collective intelligence similar to God, only lacking the capacity to understand itself, it brings us into being in order to understand itself. Only we too are part of this collective intelligence albeit completely unaware of our place in it because we're such a small part. Almost as if the universe is looking inside itself through our eyes.

Well, if it did, it did a piss poor job, because we really don't have a very good perspective on the whole of the universe, being in a relatively large but otherwise quite plain galaxy, near a somewhat small but extremely common star, in a relatively young but generally mature solar system. If the universe wanted some perspective on itself, surely it could have made better observers capable of taking in more information from a better vantage point, and with a larger capacity for understanding.

I don't think the universe made man to understand itself, because I think that misunderstands the role of man in the universe. Man isn't here to understand anything. We aren't very good at it, and even when we do understand something we have problems articulating what in the hell we just did.

No. Man doesn't understand, we do things. And if the universe has intentions, and put us here for some reason, it is to micromanage the structure of the universe in our local area. And we are doing an AMAZING job at that. We have already effected the earth's orbit around the sun (by a few milimeters/century or something) by throwing so much material into space that it slows us down. Our effect on the surface of the planet is plainly evident, even from space. We are radiating all sorts of information in the form of radio waves and so on, and planets aren't supposed to radiate anything. Not to mention the fact that we have broken apart atoms, and created new particles and elements that have never existed in isolation, slowed down light, and all sort of other microeffects on local space-time.

Its like we are nanobots hard at work to restructure our small area of the universe.

LePoissonDeNoel said
Setting aside all the religious crap for a moment, I like this idea or philosophy. I am greatly amused by the idea of mankind being a dim-witted, stumbling, angry drunk with the ability to render a planet uninhabitable but without the ability to comprehend anything of real value.

Aww look at human civilization it's so cute aww

Its a bit more dark and ironic than that, because we pride ourselves on our knowledge and understanding. We think its what makes us special.

Predicting the outcome

2005-11-29T18:11:00.000-06:00

Here's some pictures, you fiends. I have 2 more rolls worth, which I will construct into a narrative at some point in the future. But I am too busy to satisfy your voyeuristic gluttony at the moment. Instead, I'll quote something about computers.

From Science Daily (which I admit is pretty shitty): Researchers Use Brain Scans To Predict Behavior

By peering into the minds of volunteers preparing to play a brief visual game, neuroscientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found they can predict whether the volunteers will succeed or fail at the game.

"Before we present the task, we can use brain activity to predict with about 70 percent accuracy whether the subject will give a correct or an incorrect response," says lead author Ayelet Sapir, Ph.D., a postdoctoral research associate in neurology.

Eleven seconds before volunteers played the game - discriminating the direction of a field of moving dots - scientists showed them a hint: an arrow pointing to where the moving dots were likely to appear. The dots were visible only for one-fifth of a second and therefore were easy to miss if a subject was not paying attention to the right area.

After the hint and prior to the appearance of the moving dots, researchers scanned the volunteers with functional brain imaging, which reveals increases in blood flow to different brain areas indicative of increased activity in those regions. Based on brain activity patterns that reflected whether the subjects used the hint or not, scientists found they could frequently predict whether a volunteer's response would be right or wrong before the volunteers even had a chance to try to see the dots.

So we can predict how you will behave in a game situation, eh? Thats nice.

Waiting for pictures

2005-11-28T11:41:00.000-06:00

I will post about my New York adventures soon enough, once I have all the pictures we took compiled. Gally took some pics that are up on the net somewhere, but I don't have the link on me at the moment. But patience, you will see pictures soon.

I should point out though, that in my absence a few good articles on human-machine interaction were published on the net. By Science and Theology News.

From: S&TN (under the heading "Real Life Religion")- A cyborg explores what it means to be human

"With a cochlear implant, the biology of your ear is not running the show anymore - the software controlling the electrodes is," said Chorost, who was partially deaf since birth. "You become a creature of software, and I found that a strange and creepy thought at first."

Since the surgery, Chorost says he relishes his new designation but realizes that "cyborg" is just a reductive label - simply the acknowledgment of his computer-aided hearing. He insists he experiences the same things as other people.

Also of interest from the same issue, same section: I, robot? Ethical considerations of cyborgs

Warwick writes that in a brain with both mechanical and human parts the "epicenter of moral and ethical decision making is no longer of purely human form but rather it is of a mixed human, machine base."
...

Crittenden said cyborgs may provoke humanity to engage in what he calls "self-deselection" - the idea that in replacing parts of our bodies with mechanical devices we will essentially be replacing ourselves with another species. Our technologically based culture is the first step in the descent toward self-deselection, he said.

Trust me

2005-11-19T13:07:00.000-06:00

I'm tellin you baby you're wonderful.

From Wired: War-Zone Test for Babel-Fish Tool

But even the best computerized translation is still prone to errors. At worst, a single botched translation can spur a string of miscommunications.

"No one in the military would make life or death decisions based on a machine translation," Benjamin said. But when you have to sift through lots of information quickly, "it's an extremely effective triage device."

Question:

What do we say when we do make a life or death decision based on machine translation? Thank you?

Another Google Post

2005-11-18T12:03:00.000-06:00

Yes, I'm a fanatic.

From PBS's I, Cringely: Google-Mart

The same follows for the rumor that Google, as a dark fiber buyer, will turn itself into some kind of super ISP. Won't happen. And WHY it won't happen is because ISPs are lousy businesses and building one as anything more than an experiment (as they are doing in San Francisco with wireless) would only hurt Google's earnings.

So why buy-up all that fiber, then?

The probable answer lies in one of Google's underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn't just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.

While Google could put these containers anywhere, it makes the most sense to place them at Internet peering points, of which there are about 300 worldwide.
...

This is more than another Akamai or even an Akamai on steroids. This is a dynamically-driven, intelligent, thermonuclear Akamai with a dedicated back-channel and application-specific hardware.

There will be the Internet, and then there will be the Google Internet, superimposed on top. We'll use it without even knowing. The Google Internet will be faster, safer, and cheaper. With the advent of widespread GoogleBase (again a bit-schlepping app that can be used in a thousand ways -- most of them not even envisioned by Google) there's suddenly a new kind of marketplace for data with everything a transaction in the most literal sense as Google takes over the role of trusted third-party info-escrow agent for all world business. That's the goal.
...

Say the containers cost $500,000 each in volume and $500,000 per year to run. That's $300 million to essentially co-opt the Internet. And you know whose strategy this is? Wal-Mart's. And unless Google comes up with an ecosystem to allow their survival, that means all the other web services companies will be marginalized. There will be startups and little guys, but no medium-sized companies. ISPs, which we've thought of as a threatened species, won't be touched, but then their profit margins are so low they aren't worth touching. After all, Wal-Mart doesn't try to own the roads its goods are carried over. And the final result is that Web 2.0 IS Google.

Microsoft can't compete. Yahoo probably can't compete. Sun and IBM are like remora, along for the ride. And what does it all cost, maybe $1 billion? That's less than Microsoft spends on legal settlements each year.

Game over.

ICANN IS OURS BITCHES

2005-11-16T10:36:00.000-06:00

Thats right. Uh huh.

From WaPo: Deal Reached on Managing the Internet

TUNIS, Tunisia -- A U.N. technology summit opened Wednesday after an 11th-hour agreement that leaves the United States with ultimate oversight of the main computers that direct the Internet's flow of information, commerce and dissent.
...

Although Pakistan and other countries sought a takeover of that system by an international body such as the United Nations, negotiators ultimately agreed, as time ran out, to a create an open-ended international forum for raising important Internet issues. The forum, however, would have no binding authority.

The onus now lies with the developing world to bring in not just opinions, but investment to expand the Internet to their benefit, said U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce Michael D. Gallagher.

David Gross, the U.S. State Department's top official on Internet policy, told reporters that despite the U.S. hand in ICANN, Internet governance was not the provenance of one specific country.

"The term ... is quite broad. It is very inclusive," he said, trying to dismiss claims that the U.S. is holding onto its position as the arbiter of the Internet.

What we need to see now is the US backing off of any appearance of control over ICANN, and ICANN itself taking measures to distance itself from US policy.

The bloggers on hand at the convention don't seem to know what to make of this news. In general they seem disappointed with the EU's handling of the situation, which began well but fizzled quickly. For instance:

It is a far cry from the inter-governmental oversight body that was proposed by the European Union in September. That proposal, which shocked the US as much as it pleased Brazil, China and Iran, pushed the previously unnoticed issue of internet governance on to the world stage and turned the topic into the main focus of the WSIS.

Just as surprising as the EU's proposal, however, has been its failure to push that model in Tunis this week. In fiery opening statements, China and the US laid down their same, strong positions, but when it came to the EU to speak, delegation head David Hendon said only that it had "looked carefully at all positions, including our own" and deferred to the chair of the committee over which direction the meeting would take.

In any case, this is happy news. And to celebrate the happiness, here's an article on the $100 laptops developed by MIT to help quash the digital divide across the world, which is really the main focus of WSIS. According to the BBC, "worldwide only 14% of the population is online, compared to 62% in the US."

WaPo: MIT Is Crafting Cheap -- But Invaluable -- Laptops

Yes, thats a hand crank.

*** UPDATE *** - This post has been linked by Slate, which officially counts as the biggest media coverage I have thus far recieved. Let that influence your opinion on Slate accordingly. It quotes a dumb comment I made, probably while high, so I am a bit too embarassed to let this occupy a new post. However, I'd like to say that I appreciate the word 'maven', though I admit having to look it up to make sure it didn't have any feminine connotations.

Time

2005-11-15T18:10:00.000-06:00

Biological or atomic?

From Scientific American: Wait a Second

Leap seconds are needed because the earth's spin is slowing down, gradually and unevenly. The rotational changes arise because of tidal forces exerted by the moon and inertial effects related to the liquid outer core sloshing around and to the cycle of evaporation, in which water at the equator gets deposited at the poles as ice that melts seasonally.

The present system is a compromise between taking advantage of the most accurate timepieces--that is, atomic clocks--and respecting traditional timekeeping via the sun's position. To people who want to end leap seconds, Levine explains, "the really fundamental quantity is not time but frequency--and frequency comes from quantum mechanics; it is a property of atoms. And what these folks really want is for time to represent frequency in a smooth, continuous way." Levine does not speak officially for NIST, but he is the person who, on December 1, will formally alert authorities to add the leap second at the end of the month.
...

The existing compromise system, Levine notes, also sows confusion. For one, the leap second occurs in the middle of the day in Asia and Australia, causing a time hiccup during stock trading. For another, the more timescales there are, the easier it is for a programmer to make an error in calculations.

I like the idea of time 'hiccups' on the trading floor of a stock exchange with people rabidly screaming and waving their arms, and then everything coming to a sudden halt for a second or two, and then everything picking back up again. I find the general prospect of attempting to fit geocentric (and hence, biological) time to our more accurate and technologically advanced atomic time pieces, and that the imprecision of the fit allows for gaps and fits and jerks, like a computer slowly booting up.

I suppose the pragmatic efficiencies of switching to unified and universal time makes it the defacto forerunner in this debate, but there is something crude and exacting and mechanical in severing the concept of time from the biorhythmic process that yielded its discovery.

edit: For anyone who cares, you can read all the live blog updates on the WSIS proceedings here. I'll try to keep abreast of the details.

Floating in the ocean

2005-11-14T13:33:00.000-06:00

Google is just one of the key players in the current battle over centralization over the internet.

NYT: Control the Internet? A Futile Pursuit, Some Say

"Everyone seems to think that the D.N.S. system is a big deal, but it's not the heartbeat of the Internet," said Leonard Kleinrock, a computer scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who did pioneering research in data packet switching, the fundamental technique underlying networks. "Who controls the flow of the ocean? Nobody controls it, and it works just fine. There are some things that can't be controlled and should be left distributed."

Icann was created at the Clinton administration's behest as a private-public alliance to oversee Internet addresses. Although Icann says it is advised by more than 80 nations and has had citizens of many countries on its board, it operates under a memorandum of understanding with the Commerce Department.

Icann was founded with the intent of becoming an independent or "denationalized" group. But in June, the Bush administration backed away from that plan, saying in a "statement of principles" issued by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration that the United States had the right to maintain oversight of Icann indefinitely.
...

"The idea of taking over Icann is a nonstarter," said Robert Kahn, who as a Pentagon executive oversaw the financing of the original Arpanet and was later responsible, with Vinton G. Cerf, for the design of the Internet's crucial software framework, known as TCP/IP. "There is nothing in there to control, and there are huge issues that the governments of the world really do need to work on."
...

Unlike centralized networks with a single point of failure and control, the Internet was designed to suffer damage and continue to function. That same quality makes it exceedingly difficult to control or filter.

"The idea of Internet control is an oxymoron," said Robert Taylor, who as a director at the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the Pentagon during the 1960's initiated the development of the Arpanet.

Having written about the idea of using computers for communications during the 1960's, Mr. Taylor rejected the idea of basing the network on a centralized computer and instead adopted a proposal put forward by an electrical engineer, Wesley A. Clark, to build a network with no center point of control.

"I didn't trust big centralized organizations," he recalled.
...

Now he suspects that part of the political conflict is about the vast wealth that has been created by the Internet. "I suspect there is a belief there is money to be made," he said.

The Freedom of Information

2005-11-14T10:50:00.000-06:00

Google is in the news a lot lately. They just opened their Analytics service, The Google Story goes on sale tomorrow, their resident Evangelist has been appearing before congress, and the NYT published this article:

NYT: If Books Are on Google, Who Gains and Who Loses?

But the categories are all wrong. Organized information - information given shape and meaning - is never really free. And the virtues of "open source" software are not simply that it avoids corporate ownership. The operating system Linux, for example, has succeeded not just because varied individuals are freely contributing to its evolution, but also because companies are supporting it, and panels of overseers and a strict organizational procedure govern its specialized licenses.

Technology also keeps unsettling the categories. Some new forms of control will be needed to prevent unrestricted copying, but technological innovation will undermine attempts to apply too much control. Some flexibility is needed to prevent the stifling of communication and commerce, but technological innovation will foil those who believe it should not exist at all. This doesn't make things easy; it makes them unpredictable.

The internet is clearly evolving, and Google is its brain.

Neutral thoughts

2005-11-11T10:44:00.000-06:00

A few more thoughts about internet neutrality. This issue, which is undoubtedly raging through the blogosphere right now (of course cleverly instigated by Google's own propaganda machine), is perhaps the biggest one facing the shape of the internet today, and our own social communications more generally. How these issues are decided will determine the future of the online world.

One of the things that set the debate off recently was SBC CEO Ed Whitacre's remarks about Google 'using thier pipes for free' in a recent interview:

How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google (GOOG ), MSN, Vonage, and others?

How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! (YHOO ) or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!

To anyone who uses the internet with any regularity, this statement feels horribly backwards and ignorant to the point of being dangerous. First off, Google pays its bandwidth bills, as do every user of SBC's services. Everything going through SBC's pipes has been paid for. What he is complaining about, however, is that Google's services are only possible through the network infrastructure that SBC have invested a lot of money in.

Its as if SBC built a bridge connecting Google on the one side, and its users on the other, and tolls each as they cross. But then it realizes that the bridge it built is the only way customers can go back and forth to Google, and Google keeps making lots of money on SBC's initial investment- so SBC decides to charge Google again for each customer it serves.

Now, if just SBC were of this mindset it wouldn't be a huge problem: users would stop using SBC's pipes, and SBC would suffer because of it. You can't limit Google from your users without expecting some backlash. But this is just the iceberg in a general attack on internet neutrality across the board.

From ars technica: Monitoring traffic to nickel and dime you

I've seen the future, and it's a tad bit scary. Here's what in the works: networking analysis technology that "knows" what kind of content is being passed on a network, and can act appropriately. Perhaps it will block the traffic. Or, maybe you'll be charged for it. The future, in some places, is now.
...

Could it happen in the US? Yes and no. The US already has laws on the books that would make it illegal for a carrier to block traffic from a competitor, but don't worry, Narus' president of marketing Jay Thomas has it all figured out. Prepare to be incensed.

"But there's nothing that keeps a carrier in the United States from introducing jitter, so the quality of the conversation isn't good," Thomas says. "So the user will either pay for the carrier's voice-over-Internet application, which brings revenue to the carrier, or pay the carrier for a premium service that allows Skype use to continue. You can deteriorate the service, introduce latency [audible delays in hearing the other end of the line], and also offer a premium to improve it."

These attempts to centralize control over the internet are exactly what Vint Cerf was arguing against in the House Commerce and Energy hearings. The fact of the matter is that keeping internet neutrality is beneficial to both the consumer and the businesses, provided that their business model is geared towards a neutral internet, as Google's is; and Google is fighting for regulation to maintain that neutrality. It just so happens that Google's interests coincide with our own, but thats not merely a happy coincidence- Google's entire business model rests on its users and contributors for content and information. Google needs us as much as we need it. But the older, more established telecom companies, like SBC, who have a top-down model of their consumers, sees neutrality as a threat to their centralized control over the internet, and it is a threat being launched on the infrastructure that they built.

Any way you slice it, it doesn't look like it will be a nice, neat battle. And there is a lot at stake. Hopefully this starts to get more media coverage in the near future.

For more information, ars technica linked to a paper (PDF) by Barbara van Schewick that is worth reading.

Internet neutrality

2005-11-10T22:43:00.000-06:00

Vint Cerf gave a letter to congress about the impending telecommunications bill. Read the full letter at Google Blog.

The remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design. The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services. The Internet is based on a layered, end-to-end model that allows people at each level of the network to innovate free of any central control. By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation. This has led to an explosion of offerings - from VOIP to 802.11x wi-fi to blogging - that might never have evolved had central control of the network been required by design.

My fear is that, as written, this bill would do great damage to the Internet as we know it. Enshrining a rule that broadly permits network operators to discriminate in favor of certain kinds of services and to potentially interfere with others would place broadband operators in control of online activity. Allowing broadband providers to segment their IP offerings and reserve huge amounts of bandwidth for their own services will not give consumers the broadband Internet our country and economy need. Many people will have little or no choice among broadband operators for the foreseeable future, implying that such operators will have the power to exercise a great deal of control over any applications placed on the network.

As we move to a broadband environment and eliminate century-old non-discrimination requirements, a lightweight but enforceable neutrality rule is needed to ensure that the Internet continues to thrive. Telephone companies cannot tell consumers who they can call; network operators should not dictate what people can do online.

Centralizing control over the internet would be one of the most distructive acts to our social network, including our freedom of speech and expression, and our freedom of assembly, that the government could pass.

Interconnections

2005-11-10T13:01:00.000-06:00

Our interconnections are almost wholly inorganic and entirely technological now. We do not touch, but we still converse. Interestingly, this conversation does not take the form of words and symbols, but in terms of images and sounds and colors and movement and icons that have inclusive meaning. Personal meaning. That doesn't imply the meanings of our interactions aren't public- they obviously are. But we have let these cultural icons penetrate into our very core identity.

This isn't anything new, of course. What is new is that this identity is constituted not by our biological humanity but by our technological interconnections.

The Guardian: Growing up with the wired generation

But the effects of technological advancement are unavoidable. Three out of four children have access to the internet via a computer at home. One in three children who use the internet makes friends online. Children in the UK aged between 10 and 19 own approximately 7.5m mobile phones, on which they send many of the 89m text messages written daily. And one pound in every 10 of disposable income was spent by teenagers on mobile products and services this year.

It is an astonishing level of penetration. The mobile phone, especially, has become an integral part of a young adult's everyday life. Ringtones are a badge of identity as much as the clothes you wear; text and picture messaging is the way to spread the word. A phone in your pocket is not only reassuring but commands respect. Graham Brown, chief executive of DhaliwalBrown, which runs Wireless World Forum (W2F) and mobileYouth, says: "Mobile music is a tool for timeless psychological needs - the need to belong through peer group reinforcement and the need to be significant, through status." Knowledge is power

For the new MTV generation, the mobile is also one of many sources of information. And knowledge is power. What to wear, what to listen to and where to go: modern technology provides the answers.

"Word of mouth as a source of information has always been trusted, especially by younger generations," says the report. "The speed of the internet means that websites can provide information quicker, and its size means that a far greater pool of talent can potentially be accessed in a single sitting. Its information is trusted more because it is perceived to resemble word of mouth... This is why viral marketing campaigns work so well."

iRobot enters the public space of reasons

2005-11-09T16:11:00.000-06:00

AKA the market

From The Boston Globe: Test for iRobot

n a rare public stock sale by a robot maker, iRobot issued 5 million shares for $24 per share yesterday, raising $120 million for the company. IRobot will begin trading on the Nasdaq exchange this morning under the symbol IRBT.

IRobot's initial public offering will be a test of whether robotics, a field that long has drawn public fascination but Wall Street skepticism, is finally ready to emerge as a business sector worth investing in. The company's public launch will also measure the health of the nation's IPO market, largely frozen since 2001, which has been slowly thawing the past two years. The ability to take a company public is critical to entrepreneurs and their backers.

I have faith in the American consumer to take advantage of our robot brethren. iRobot has a particular kind of quaint charm (that of course comes right out of Brook's own academic work on AI), but I'm not as sure that the company will take robotics outside of the 'charmingly useful' arena and into the 'essential social infrastructure' level.

Google simmers

2005-11-09T11:40:00.000-06:00

From WaPo: My Dinner With Google

"Every night I would rummage around my kitchen for something to eat and then go in the back room to look through cookbooks," said Hourihan, the former Massachusetts software engineer who is considered the pioneer of Google cooking. "Then I thought, 'Why am I looking through cookbooks when I can just sit at my computer and Google it?' "
...

"It's good when you don't have a clear idea of what to make with an odd combination of ingredients," said Hourihan, 60, who Google cooks at least once a week. "You take your chances, but it really pays off. I have never put in a combination that I did not find a recipe for."

And therein lies the appeal of Google cooking: It helps you build a meal from bottom up (vs. recipe down), while also purging your kitchen of languishing edibles, aging produce and meats, or overstocked perishables (i.e., that crate of pineapples bought impulsively during a Hawaiian vacation).

"It's good for helping those lacking creativity or for spur-of-the-moment cooking," said Charlie Ayers, former Google company chef. "It can also clear out the dead inventory or clean out the refrigerator."

Do I need to put questions here for you to get the point?

Tag team back again

2005-11-09T11:20:00.000-06:00

Party on, party people

From Wired: Cars Chat and Park Themselves

Toyota displayed some of the most impressive demonstrations at the show, including its Intelligent Parking Assist, currently available in Japan and Europe. Toyota officials said these add-ons will likely be released in the United States in 2006.
...

When the driver moves into position to begin parallel parking and puts the car in reverse, a rear view comes up on the Prius' standard dashboard screen, displaying the available spot. The screen also uses the painted parking lines as guidelines and draws its own lines over them on the display -- similar to how television sports commentators draw on top of an image.

When the driver clicks on the screen to let the Prius take over the parallel parking, the wheel moves on its own. The driver uses only the brake pedal to control speed. The whole operation takes just several seconds.

The system will "take (away) the fear of parallel parking for new drivers," said Allan Pett, another Toyota engineer.
...

Another technology, which may take a few more years to fully deploy, is vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Using the upcoming 802.11p wireless standard, General Motors equipped two cars with wireless transponders that broadcast various pieces of information such as speed and braking status to nearby cars. When one car brakes in front of another, even one down the road and out of sight, a small icon on the dashboard of the trailing vehicle indicates a stopped automobile up ahead.

You must acquit

2005-11-08T20:10:00.000-06:00

Please help me

2005-11-08T10:21:00.000-06:00

From Seattle PI: Amazon creates artificial artificial intelligence

Amazon.com has launched a new program called Amazon Mechanical Turk, through which a computer can ask humans to perform tasks that it can't do itself.
...

"Today, we build complex software applications based on the things computers do well, such as storing and retrieving large amounts of information or rapidly performing calculations," the company said. "However, humans still significantly outperform the most powerful computers at completing such simple tasks as identifying objects in photographs -- something children can do even before they learn to speak.

I popped my cherry

2005-11-05T22:50:00.000-06:00

Yep. I was put on probation for the first time in my almost 4 years at SA, in a thread entitled "Philosophy: whats left?". This picture sums up the situation nicely (thanks, ReindeerF).

So no more posting for the next 68 hours. Whoopee.

Also, for the record, thanks Zwichenzug, I finally installed the code, and it seems to work fine. I thought about putting in trackbacks but I realized no one reads my blog anyway. But that wont prevent me from cleaning it up for myself. Next project: labels to file posts under.

Google sees

2005-11-05T17:25:00.000-06:00

and it knows what it sees.

Play this game: Guess the Google.

The interesting thing is how easy this is. The answers are usually obvious, by looking at the pictures.

But Google lacks common sense, right? Right? Guys?

edit: Oh, if you think I am fanatical about Google, take a look at this guy. And he works for Microsoft.

Ninni Niddi Niche

2005-11-03T13:49:00.000-06:00

We interrupt your normally scheduled programming for this breaking news

From Nature: Evolutionary theory: Personal effects (may need uni proxy)

In the Negev Desert of Israel, small organisms can have a big impact. Take the cyanobacteria that live in the soil. Some species secrete sugary substances that form a crust of sand and soil, protecting the bacterial colonies from the effects of erosion. When the rains come, the crusty patches divert water into pools in which wind-borne seeds can germinate. These plants in turn make the soil more hospitable for other plants. Thanks in part to these bacteria, patches of vegetation can be found where they might not otherwise exist. The action of the bacteria, together with local climate change, could lead to the greening of large parts of the desert.

The Negev cyanobacteria, and organisms like them, are also having an impact on evolutionary biologists these days. Examples of creatures altering their environment abound - from beavers that dam streams and earthworms that enrich the soil to humans who irrigate deserts. But too little attention has been given to the consequences of this, say advocates of niche construction. This emerging view in biology stresses that organisms not only adapt to their environments, but also in part create them. The knock-on effects of this interplay between organism and environment, say niche constructivists, have generally been neglected in evolutionary models. Despite pointed criticism from some prominent biologists, niche construction has been winning converts.

"What we're saying is not only novel, but also slightly disturbing," says Kevin Laland, an evolutionary biologist at the University of St Andrews in Fife, UK, and one of the authors of the idea. "If we're right, it requires rethinking evolution."

The conventional view of evolution sees natural selection as shaping organisms to fit their environment. Niche construction, by contrast, accords the organism a much stronger role in generating a fit by recognizing the innumerable ways in which living things alter their world to suit their needs. From this perspective, the road between organism and environment is very much a two-way street.

Finally, the scientists are catching up to me.

Discussion questions:

1) Can the distinction between organism and environment be maintained on the niche constructivist view?

2) Notice that machines are clearly examples of niche construction on this view. In this sense, the article agrees with Arendt, in that machines are not merely instrumental: they constitute the furniture of the world, which we have constructed. However, Arendt maintains that machines are not just furniture of the world, but actors (laborers) in their own right. This gives a somewhat different reason to deny my claim that machines can participate in human activities. On the other hand, the complexity of interaction between organism and environment, and the quality of feedback between the two, seems to make this less problematic, or at least raises the question: does the environment participate in our activities, on the niche constructionist view?

3) Don't you hate it when people pronounce 'niche' in the way the title of this post suggests?

Arendt VIII

2005-11-03T09:50:00.000-06:00

One more after this

One thing is certain: the continuous automatic process of manufacturing has not only done away with the "unwarranted assumption" that "human hands guided by human brains represent the optimum efficiency," but with the much more important assumption that the things of the world around us should depend upon human design and be built in accordance with human standards of either utility or beauty. In place of both utility and beauty, which are standards of the world, we have come to design products that still fulfill certain "basic functions," but whose shape will be primarily determined by the operation of the machine. The "basic functions" are of course the function of the animal's life process, since no other function is basically necessary, but the product itself- not only its variations but even the "total change to a new product"- will depend entirely upon the capacity of the machine.

To design objects for the operational capacity of the machine instead of designing machines for the production of certain objects would indeed be the exact reversal of the means-ends category, if this category still made any sense. But even the most general end, the release of manpower, that was usually assigned to machines, is now thought to be a secondary and obsolete aim, inadequate to and limiting potential "startling increases in efficiency." As matters stand today, it has become as senseless to describe the world of machines in terms of means and ends as it has always been senseless to ask nature if she produced the seed to produce the tree or the tree to produce the seed. By the same token, it is quite probably that the continuous process pursuant to the channeling of nature's never-ending process into the human world, though it may very well destroy the world qua world as human artifice, will as reliably and limitlessly provide the species man-kind with the necessities of life as nature herself did before men erected their artificial home on earth and set up a barrier between themselves and nature.

Arendt VII

2005-11-02T12:36:00.000-06:00

Almost done

The discussion of the whole problem of technology, that is, of the transformation of life and world through the introduction of the machine, has been strangely led astray through an all-too-inclusive concentration upon the serviceor disservice the machines render to men. The assumption here is that every tool and implement is primarily designed to make human life easier and human labor less painful. Their instrumentality is understood exclusively in this anthropocentric sense. But the instrumentality of tools and implements is much more closely related to the objects it is designed to produce, and their sheer "human value" is restricted to the use the animal laborans makes of them. In other words, homo faber, the toolmaker, invented tools and implements in order to erect a world, not- at least, not primarily- to help the human life process. The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy world and things.

Arendt VI

2005-11-01T09:59:00.000-06:00

Continued

The channeling of natural forces into the human world has shattered the very purposefulness of the world, the fact that objects are the ends for which tools and implements are designed. It is characteristic of all natural processes that they come into being without the help of man, and those things are natural which are not "made" but grow by themselves into whatever they become. (This is also the authentic meaning of our word "nature", whether we derive it from its latin root nasci, to be born, or trace it back to its Greek origin, physis, which comes from phyein, to grow out of, to appear by itself.) Unlike the products of human hands, which must be realized step by step and for which the fabrication process is entirely distinct from the existence of the fabricated thing itself, the natural thing's existence is not separate but is somehow identical with the process through which it comes into being: the seed contains, and, in a certain sense, already is the tree, and the tree stops being if the process of growth through which it came into existence stops. If we see these processes against the background of human purposes, which have a willed beginning and a definite end, they assume the character of automatism. We call automatic all courses of movement which are self-moving and therefore outside the range of wilful and purposeful interference. In the mode of production ushered in by automation, the distinction between operation and product, as well as the product's precedence over the operation (which is only the means to produce the end), no longer make sense and have become obsolete. The categories of homo faber and his world apply here no more than they ever could apply to nature and the natural universe. This is, incidentally, why modern advocates of automation usually take a very determined stand against the mechanistic view of nature and against the practical utilitarianism of the eighteenth century, which were so eminently characteristic of the one-sided, single minded work orientation of homo faber.

Arendt V

2005-10-31T18:36:00.000-06:00

Continued

Automation is the most recent stage in this development, which indeed "illuminates the whole history of mechanism." It certainly will remain the culminating point of the modern development, even if the atomic age and a technology based upon nuclear discoveries puts a rather rapid end to it. The first instruments of nuclear technology, the various types of atom bombs, which, if released in sufficient and not even very great quantities, could destroy all organic life on earth, present sufficient evidence for the enormous scale on which such a change might take place. Here it would no longer be a question of unchaining and letting loose elementary natural processes, but of handling on the earth and in everyday life energies and forces such as occur only outside the earth, in the universe; this is already done, but only in the research laboratories of the nuclear physicist. If present technology consists of channeling forces into the world of the human artifice, future technology may yet consist of channeling the universal forces of the cosmos around us into the nature of the earth. It remains to be seen whether these future techniques will transform the household of nature as we have known it since the beginning of our world to the same extent or even more than the present technology has changed the very worldliness of the human artifice.

Arendt IV

2005-10-30T16:15:00.000-06:00

Continued.

As is so frequently the case with historical developments, it seems as though the actual implications of technology, that is, of the replacement of tools and implements with machinery, have come to light only in its last stage, with the advent of automation. For our purposes it may be useful to recall, however briefly, the main stages of modern technology's development since the beginning of the modern age. The first stage, the invention of the steam engine, which led into the industrial revolution, was still characterized by an imitation of natural processes and the use of natural forces for human purposes, which did not differ in principle from the old use of water and wind power. Not the principle of the steam engine was new but rather the discovery and use of the coal mines to feed it. The natural machine tools of this early stage reflect this imitation of naturally known processes; they too, imitate and put to more powerful use the natural activities of the human hand. But today we are told that "the greatest pitfall to avoid is the assumption that the design aim is reproduction of the hand movements of the operator or laborer"

The next stage is chiefly characterized by the use of electricity, and, indeed, electricity still determines the present stage of technical development. This stage can no longer be described in terms of gigantic enlargement and continuation of the old arts and crafts, and it is only to this world that the categories of homo faber, to whom every instrument is a means to achieve a prescribed end, no longer apply. For here we no longer use material as nature yields it to us, killing natural processes or interrupting or imitating them. In all these instances, we changed and denaturalized nature for our own worldly ends, so that the human world or artifice on one hand and nature on the other remained two distinctly separate entities. Today we have begun to "create", as it were, that is, to unchain natural processes of our own which would never have happened without us, and instead of carefully surrounding the human artifice with defenses against nature's elementary forces, keeping them as far as possible outside the man-made world, we have channeled these forces, along with their elementary power, into the world itself. The result has been a veritable revolution in the concept of fabrication; manufacturing, which wlways had been "a series of separate steps," has become "a continuous process," the process of the conveyor belt and the assembly line.

Arendt III

2005-10-29T14:49:00.000-05:00

Continued from yesterday.

The decisive difference between tools and machines is perhaps best illustrated by the apparently endless discussion of whether man should be "adjusted" to the machine or the machines should be adjusted to the "nature" of man. We mentioned in the first chapter the chief reason why such a discussion must be sterile: if the human condition consists in man's being a conditioned being for whom everything, given or man-made, immediately becomes a condition of his further existence, then man "adjusted" himself to an environment of machines the moment he designed them. They certainly have become as inalienable a condition of our existence as tools and implements were in all previous ages. The interest of the discussion, from our point of view, therefore, lies rather in the fact that this question of adjustment could arise at all. There never was any doubt about man's being adjusted or needing special adjustment to the tools he used; one might as well have adjusted him to his hands. The case of the machines is entirely different. Unlike the tools of workmanship, which at every given moment in the work process remain the servants of the hand, the machines demand that the laborer serve them, that he adjust the natural rhythm of his body to their mechanical movement. This, certainly, does not imply that men as such adjust to or become the servants of their machines; but it does mean that, as long as the work at the machine lasts, the mechanical process has replaced the rhythm of the human body. Even the most refined tool remains a servant, unable to guide or to replace the hand. Even the most primitve machine guides the body's labor and eventually replaces it altogether.

Arendt II

2005-10-28T10:32:00.000-05:00

Continued from yesterday.

If we consider this loss of the faculty to distinguish clearly between means and ends in terms of human behavior, we can say that the free disposition and use of tools for a specific end product is replaced by rhythmic unification of the laboring body with its implement, the movement of laboring itself acting as the unifying force. Labor but not work requires for best results a rhythmically ordered performance and, in so far as many laborers gang together, needs a rhythmic co-ordination of all individual movements(1). In this motion, the tools lose their instrumental character, and the clear distinction between man and his implements, as well as his ends, becomes blurred. What dominates the labor process and all work processes which are performed in the mode of laboring is neither man's purposeful effort nor the product he may desire, but the motion of the labor process itself and the rhythm it imposes upon the laborers. Labor implements are drawn into this rhythm until body and tool swing in the same repetitive movement, that is, until, in the use of machines, which of all implements are best suited to the performance of the animal laborans, it is no longer the body's movement that determines the implement's movemement but the machine's movement which enforced the movements of the body. The point is that nothing can be mechanized more easily and less artificially than the rhythm of the labor process, which in its turn corresponds to the equally automatic repetitive rhythm of the life process and its metabolism with nature. Precisely because the animal laborans does not use tools and instruments in order to build a world but in order to ease the labors of its own life process, it has lived literally in a world of machines ever since the industrial revolution and the emancipation of labor replaced almost all hand tools with machines which in one way or another supplanted human labor power with the superior power of natural forces.

(1) Karl Buchner's well-known compilation of rhythmic labor songs in 1897 has been followed by a voluminous literature of a more scientific nature. One of the best of these studies (Joseph Schoop, Das deutsche Arbeitslied [1935]) stresses that there exist only labor songs, but no work songs. The songs of the craftsmen are social; they are sung after work. The fact is, of course, that there exists no "natural" rhythm for work. The striking resemblance between the "natural" rhythm inherent in every laboring operation and the rhythm of the machines is sometimes noticed, apart from the repeated complaints about the "artificial" rhythm which the machines impose upon the laborer. Such complaints, characteristically, are relatively rare among the laborers themselves, who, on the contrary, seem to find the same amount of pleasure in repetitive machine work as in other repetitive labor... This confirms observations which were already made in the Ford factories at the beginning of our century. Karl Bucher, who believed that "rhythmic labor is highly spiritual labor" (vergeistig) already stated: "Aufreibend werden nur solche einformigen Arbeiten, die sich nicht rhythmisch gestalten lassen"... For though the speed of machine work undoubtedly is much higher and more repetitive than that of "natural" spontaneous labor, the fact of a rhythmic performance as such makes that machine labor and pre-industrial labor have more in common with each other than either of them has with work...
All these theories appear highly questionable in view of the fact that the workers themselves give an altogether different reason for their preference for repetitive labor. They prefer it because it is mechanical and does not demand attention, so that while performing it they can think of something else. (they can "geistig wegtreten," as Berlin workers formulated it...). this explanation is all the more noteworthy, as it coincides with very early Christian recommendations of the merits of manual labor, which, because it demands less attention, is less likely to interfere with contemplation than other occupations and professions...

The best I could do with the translations:

"Aufreibend werden nur solche einformigen Arbeiten, die sich nicht rhythmisch gestalten lassen" = Exhausting labor will only form where no rhythmic structure is left.

"geistig wegtreten" = mentally step back

Note: Footnote slightly edited from original text to exclude some extraneous scholaraship and references

Arendt I

2005-10-27T21:25:00.000-05:00

From The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt (1958)

4.20: Work: Instrumentality and Animal Laborans

From the standpoint of homo faber, who relies entirely on the primordial tools of his hands, man is, as Benjamin Franklin said, a "tool-maker". The same instruments, which only lighten the burden and mechanize the labor of the animal laborans, are designed and invented by homo faber for the erection of a world of things, and their fitness and precision are dictated by such "objective" aims as he may wish to invent rather than by subjective needs and wants. Tools and instruments are so intensely worldly objects that we can classify whole civilizations using them as criteria. Nowhere, however, is their worldly character more manifest than where they are used in labor processes, where they are indeed the only tangible things that survive both the labor and the consumption process itself. For the animal laborans, therefore, as it is subject to and constantly occupied with the devouring processes of life, the durability and stability of the world are primarily represented in the tools and instruments it uses, and in a society of laborers, tools are very likely to assume a more than mere instrumental character or function.

The frequent complaints we hear about the perversion of ends and means in modern society, about men becoming the servants of the machines they themselves invented and of being "adapted" to their requirements instead of using them as instruments for human needs and wants, have their roots in the factual situation of laboring. In this situation, where production consists primarily in preparation for consumption, the very distinction between means and ends, so highly characteristic of the activities of homo faber, simply does not make sense, and the instruments which homo faber invented and with which he came to the help of the labor of the animal laborans therefore lose their instrumental character once they are used by it. Within the life process itself, of which laboring remains an integral part and which it never transcends, it is idle to ask questions that presuppose the category of means and end, such as whether men live and consume in order to have strength to labor, or whether they labor in order to have the means of consumption.

The Human Condition

2005-10-27T19:10:00.000-05:00

I suppose you don't much care about this, but I have a confession. I have very recently become fond of taking a shit in the 4th floor bathroom of Greg Hall. I do it late in the evening after nearly everyone has left, and where I can take my time without interruptions or knockings at the door. It is deeply satisfying, beyond the mere gastrointestinal relief.

Two points to help contextualize this.

The first is that, up until this very year, I never took a shit in a public restroom. Never. I would hold it until it gave me cramps and I felt as if I was going to pass out, but I would hold it just the same. I assume it was some sort of social anxiety disorder, though in nearly all other ways I am rather blase about standard biological functions. The bathroom on the 4th floor, however, is isolated, and HUGE- it is a single room, nearly as big as my first studio apartment, with no interior walls and two plush chairs, and a big, comfortable throne. The toilet paper is cheap industrial 1-ply, which was one of my standard excuses for not using public restrooms, but somehow in this situation it doesn't bother me.

The second point to make is that as a kid in my teens I spent a lot of time in the bathroom. I would go in to take a shit and wouldn't come out for hours. I would devour entire Calvin and Hobbes collections in one sitting. In our house, with 2 bathrooms and 7 females, it was extremely hard to get into the bathroom in the first place, so when I got the chance I emptied out my entire body cavity. I should note that this was in my pre-masturbatory youth- this wasn't sexual, it was just alone time, away from the rumbling of the house. I do remember my parents teasing me with jokes I didn't quite get, assuming it wasn't just innocent escapism, but honestly, it was.

In any case, the 4th floor bathroom here in Greg Hall has reawakened this aspect of my youth, and it has proved more than cathartic (yeah, go ahead and intend that pun)- it has proved useful. In the course of these visits I have been flipping through various books I wouldn't have read otherwise, and happened upon Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, which has an excellent description of technology and its relation to humanity. So for the next few days I will be quoting extensively from passages in the book, specifically in chapter 4: Work.

The chapter begins with section 18 and 19, about the durability of the world and the reification of the artifacts we construct, but I will being with section 20: Instrumentality and Animal Laborans.

img

2005-10-26T10:55:00.000-05:00

Manuel Presti Winner: Wildlife Photographer of the Year award

Prognostication

2005-10-25T14:17:00.000-05:00

La computadora sabe mas que tu.

From Science: Rise of the Forecasting Machines

For almost half a century, human and computer have been vying to predict the weather better. The computer long ago won the race to forecast out to a week and beyond, and human forecasters began giving ground at shorter ranges. Now comes evidence that computer simulations--aided by automatic statistical analysis--can consistently best humans at forecasts longer than 24 hours. The finding heralds an age of prognostication untouched by humans.

...
In most cases, Mass and Baars argue, human forecasters should spend most of their time on the first 12 hours or so. The rest of their time could be spent making sure the model and MOS are not making any blunders at longer ranges. Michel Béland, a director at the Meteorological Services of Canada in Dorval, Quebec, says that Canadian forecasters have already pulled back. They now primarily focus on severe and high-impact weather expected over the next 18 hours. Beyond that, the machines stand watch.

Discussion questions:

1) Do these mechanized prediction systems have knowledge? I assume that their 'claims' are justified (by the accuracy of the model they use to predict), so this question is, basically: Does the machine make a claim about the weather?

2) Are we justified in treating the system as an authority? I assume that the answer to this question is independent to your answer to the above question.

3) Does the machine understand the weather? I posit that this question reduces to (1) as follows: the machine understands the weather iff it uses the model to make claims about the weather that are more or less accurate. So the system understands the weather insofar as we can interpret the system's behavior as "using the model" and "making claims".

The Shakespeare Test

2005-10-24T11:08:00.000-05:00

One of the more absurd variations of the Turing Test I've seen:

From the NYT: Beyond Human

In his recent book, "Radical Evolution," Joel Garreau suggests a "Shakespeare test" to determine whether Prozac or cloning or full-immersion virtual reality robs us of our humanity: would the user of these innovations be recognizable to Shakespeare? Houellebecq suggests that the answer is tipping toward No. "Nothing was left now," Daniel25 notes, "of those literary and artistic works that humanity had been so proud of; the themes that gave rise to them had lost all relevance, their emotional power had evaporated."

Discussion questions:

1) Shakespeare? Seriously?

Old news

2005-10-24T10:22:00.000-05:00

This is certainly old news as far as the internet goes, but I happened upon a /. article on Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun for Game Design. The article gives a few interesting quotes that readers here might find relevant.

The first section sets the stage by discussing what exactly a game is. "Games are puzzles to solve, just like everything else we encounter in life." Koster's thesis is, essentially, that games are learning puzzles. In his experience, simple games are created by children to teach themselves useful skills. More formal games have similar goals, but modern games exist almost entirely to provide the elusive substance of fun to the player.

...
At the end of the midsection, the eternal discussion of games as art makes an appearance. Instead of equivocating, Mr. Koster makes his opinion very clear. "Art, to me, is just taking craft seriously. It's about communication (as I have said many times, in the book and elsewhere). Taking what we do seriously, *even if for frivolous ends,* just leads to better work. Considering what you are doing to be art tends to emphasize high standards, experimentation, expression, thoughtfulness, and discipline -- even if your goal is to make a gag-a-day newspaper strip or macrame hangings for your window."

I find it interesting that Koster takes a definition of games and uses that to build a theory of art, a connection I hadn't previously considered. But I wonder how helpful his definition is; Koster is dealing with the project of designing games, which among other things assumes a method for solving. I suppose I have been attempting to formulate a question about what it is to solve games, and not what games are themselves independent (or at least assuming) a solver.

Move over, SUV

2005-10-22T14:59:00.000-05:00

From The Detroit News: Toyota's single-seater electric car resembles armchair on wheels

CHIBA, Japan -- Toyota's single-seat electric car resembles a soft cuddly armchair on three wheels and comes with a virtual "friend" programmed inside that learns the driver's tastes and personality.
...
"We think it'd be fun if a driver and a car can grow together," says Hideo Miwa, a Toyota designer. "We wanted to treat the car like a living thing."

^_____^

3 ring circus

2005-10-21T10:27:00.000-05:00

You will notice a new manifestation of Server on your left: the tech memeorandum, which I ran across from a Wired article about it and its political sister site. These resources, plus Google Reader, have somewhat overwhelmed me with information, and I haven't devoted any serious time lately to publishing my own material here. Give me another couple of days, though, to try and climb this mountain and see what I can see.

edit: Perhaps I should say a bit more. From the above linked Wired article:

Others have criticized the service as being insular, since the algorithms start looking for stories by relying on a select group of A-list technology and policy bloggers.

But Rivera says that outside sources can quickly become the top item, as demonstrated when a press release from the American Association of Publishers announcing a lawsuit against Google Print instantly became the No. 1 story on Memeorandum.

Memeorandum isn't the only site trying to make sense of the real-time web. Others like digg, reddit, del.icio.us, newsmap and Blogniscient have similar goals, but many of these rely heavily on users voting on or submitting stories.

Memeorandum also has a fan in Nathan Torkington, an O'Reilly Media editor.

"Memeorandum is as much about aggregating reader intelligence as it is about aggregating articles," Torkington said in an e-mail. "It's a great step toward a tool that can turn a flood of grapes into a trickle of fine wine. Google News aggregates the editorial judgment from newspapers, but Memeorandum treats blogs and newspapers equally, which means it's tapped into the collective zeitgeist of the net."

Again, we have a scenario in which machine (algorithmic) evaluation is pit against human evaluation, and the machine ends up being more accurate, comprehensive, and sensitive to what we want from that sort of service.

Where is my mind?

2005-10-19T22:08:00.000-05:00

I can't believe I forgot about this, but this blog has been up and running for just over a year. To celebrate this joyous occasion, here's a picture of a robot from 10/6/2004:

A coherence theory of the blogosphere

2005-10-19T17:50:00.000-05:00

One main criticism of blogs coming from the established MSM is that they rely on the hard work of the journalists and simply exploit that work without directly contributing to its development. I suppose that is a legitimate complaint, and therefore I rarely link to other blogs, opting to use this medium as my own outlet instead of another empty corridor of the Great Internet Echo Chamber*.

However, that comes at something of an expense: the value of the blog is its inter-connectivity, and the amplification of evolving and competing memes constitutes the life-cycle of this great e-cosphere; by removing myself from the stream of evolution I render myself impotent.

But it would be a shame for the greater INTERNET (glory to its name) to be deprived of the first-class puns I churn out like butter (as witnessed by this post), so I have decided to dip my toes into the meme pool.

Behold! Argumentum ad baseball batum:

The Abstract Factory: The only debate on Intelligent Design that is worthy of its subject

*(GIEC, pronounced 'geek')

Lying, Responsibility, and the Media

2005-10-18T13:48:00.000-05:00

No, I'm not turning this blog into a politifest. But the Plame case (which is about to hit critical mass) raises interesting questions about the freedom of speech that I think are interesting in their own right.

Still, this article is good. From Stratfor: The Importance of the Plame Affair (subscription only). You can read the full article in D&D.

...
What we do know is this. In the course of events, reporters contacted
two senior officials in the White House -- Rove and Libby. Under the
least-damaging scenario we have heard, the reporters already knew that
Plame had worked as a NOC. Rove and Libby, at this point, were
obligated to say, at the very least, that they could neither confirm
nor deny the report. In fact, their duty would have been quite a bit
more: Their job was to lie like crazy to mislead the reporters. Rove
and Libby had top security clearances and were senior White House
officials. It was their sworn duty, undertaken when they accepted
their security clearance, to build a "bodyguard of lies" -- in
Churchill's phrase -- around the truth concerning U.S. intelligence
capabilities.

Some would argue that if the reporters already knew her identity, the
cat was out of the bag and Rove and Libby did nothing wrong. Others
would argue that if Plame or her husband had publicly stated that she
was a NOC, Rove and Libby were freed from their obligation. But the
fact is that legally and ethically, nothing relieves them of the
obligation to say nothing and attempt to deflect the inquiry. This is
not about Valerie Plame, her husband or Time Magazine. The obligation
exists for the uncounted number of NOCs still out in the field.

...

The New York Times and Time Magazine have defended not only the
decision to publish Plame's name, but also have defended hiding the
identity of those who told them her name. Their justification is the
First Amendment. We will grant that they had the right to publish
statements concerning Plame's role in U.S. intelligence; we cannot
grant that they had an obligation to publish it. There is a huge gap
between the right to publish and a requirement to publish. The concept
of the public's right to know is a shield that can be used by the
press to hide irresponsibility. An article on the NOC program
conceivably might have been in the public interest, but it is hard to
imagine how identifying a particular person as part of that program
can be deemed as essential to an informed public.

I dont have any questions, because I don't even know what sorts of questions to ask here. Miller went to jail, as she claims, for journalistic principles. Maybe she had ulterior motives, but the principle she is defending seems to be a virtuous one, lest we dissolve the freedom of speech. And yet, that same freedom is abused in the discolsing of Plame's name. I don't know how to adjudicate these issues, except that I feel strongly that the media should be held responsible for their speech without infringing on their ability to report necessary information to the public. But I dont know if there is any way to support such a position.

Goken

2005-10-17T12:43:00.000-05:00

Goken: The five wrong views (lit: the five views)

Shinken: the mistaken belief that the self is permanent and abiding.

Henken: the mistaken belief that the self exists eternally after death, or that it is annihiliated

Jaken: mistaken rejection of the workings of cause and effect (ie, karma)

Kenjuken: mistaken attachment to a false view

Kaigonjuken: adherence to a false set of precepts as a means to attain enlightenment

From: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Zen Buddhism, ed. Helen Baroni (2002)

Getting to know you

2005-10-13T22:43:00.000-05:00

So I ran an informal poll in D&D, mostly because it was a slow day. My set up was way too targeted, but the results are sort of interesting, so I thought I'd share.

Would you give up your anonymity to an artificial system?
Yes 29 16.11%
Yes, but only to a system I trust 60 33.33%
No 77 42.78%
Luddite 14 7.78%

I qualified my question in the following way:

1) I am thinking about cases like Gmail, which reads your mail for content to target advertising and so on. But for the purposes of this thread, lets assume the hypothetical artificial system tracks radically more information about your actions. It reads all your email and tracks your online activity (including chat logs, browsing habits, purchases, etc). Just to make the case more extreme, lets assume this system is part of your cell phone (or some other electronic device people carry around with them everywhere), and also tracks your personal habits- where you go to eat and shop, what you buy, your daily routine, what kinds of media you consume, what kind of girls you are attracted to, and so on. Just assume the technology for tracking this information exists.

2) You are guaranteed that no human will ever see this information. Again, just assume this technology exists and is tamper proof. Your info is encoded in a format totally unreadable by anything but this system. Lets also say that the information is only associated with you indirectly by some complex cryptographic algorithm, so that if anyone were able to hack the system, there would be no way for them to associate the information with your physical body.

3) Assume the way this information can be used is tightly regulated. For the purposes of this thread, lets assume that the only use of this information is for advertisment targeting. It can't be used against you by the government for legal purposes, the information cannot be sold or traded or used by anyone other than this advertising system, and the penalty for trangressions is death of the shareholders of the company and their extended family. In other words, assume there are no economic incentives for abusing this information except for explicit advertising purposes.

It seems to me that we enjoy our right to privacy for two basic reasons: We don't want people to know stuff that we don't want them to know, and we don't want our secrets to be used against us for someone else's advantage. In a sense, the above system is using the information against you, by targeting advertising in order to get you to buy shit you otherwise wouldn't have bought. But assuming that this is the only way the information can be used, are you still protective of your privacy when it is a machine, and not a human, that knows what you are up to?

The following is a representative sample of the responses:

Sterra said:
Sure although I don't think that this is a terribly hypothetical thing or that we really have much choice in the matter.

trimpton said:
I put no, but I must admit I use gmail. I dont exactly trust any profit driven system but I dont use my email for important documents or secrets. Although I must admit google does seem pretty benevolent which just confuses me.

Bass Concert Hall said:
Voted yes. In fact, under the standards Eripsa stated I would be happy to disclose the same to another human being. If the information will never be dissemenated into the larger society or used for anything but advertising I have been forewarned about (assuming that the advertising is private, so that other people can't infer things from the ads I'm sent), then have I really given up my privacy? The information that person has is impotent, because he can't use it against me (except in a manner I've agreed to), and he can't spread it to others who could.

Also, I love big brother, please don't kill me.

mynie said:
No because I am not comfortable with the idea of my existence having little meaning aside from my belonging to certain target markets--even if it is true.

GamingHyena said:
I voted no because, after reading the OP a few times, I don't see any apparent benefit for participating in such a system. Even if no human would see my information, the ability for an artificial system to peer into my daily life simply to direct targeted advertising to me doesn't seem like a goal worthy of my involvement.

They were basically right, the example was a bad one. So I changed it thusly:

What if, instead of advertising, the information was used by a credit card company to determine your credit rate. Again, it isn't used by anyone or anything else, it is simply a tool the system uses to evaluate your reliability and trustworthiness and so on, so it knows how much to safely charge you for borrowing money on credit.

So there is an advantage, if you behave well, to adopting this system, because you might get a better credit rate on average than the normal person.

Would you use such a system?

But by that time the thread was pretty much dead.

What do you think? Specifically, what do you make of the difference in poll numbers between option 1 and 2, given the qualifications I gave?

Web 2.0 2.0

2005-10-11T12:18:00.000-05:00

Continued discussion from yesterday.

D&D Thread

eazel posted:
I am interested in what implications this has, specifically for marketing research (incidentally, a lot of the business impacts O'Reilly talked about had to do with marketing on the web). Consider the Ralph's Club Card: it tracks your buying habits so that when you check out, you receive a coupon relevant to your purchases. This is being linked to the cash register from a central database that is constantly analyzing trends across products. How much is that data about you worth and to whom? Would Google want a piece of that action to deliver even better targeted ads? Could Google charge extra to it's advertising customers to add analysis based on this new data? How personal is this data and could you legally opt-out of information sharing agreements? Should Congress regulate this information sharing since it probably crosses state lines or should it be left to the individual states to decide?

I wont pretend to understand anything about the business models at work here, but I will say this:

Google's system works by harvesting the activity of its users for information, which it uses to make money. In this way, it doesn't need to charge the user for the service but can still collect on their actions. And only by maintaining this kind of free use service can Google remain the most widely used internet app.

So I don't mind if they team up with Ralph's and monitor my every move in an attempt to sell their wares to me, as long as that process works to maintain quick, easy, and cheap access to the resources of the internet.

Which, as the article explains in detail, is one of the virtues of this reconceptualization of the internet: it looks like they (read: big business) finally appreciate the contributions of the consumers in the market, the dedication and care we put into the things we are passionate for, how responsive we are to a dynamic, interactive medium.

eazel posted:
So as long as it benefits you, meaning more personalization of the, well, "Internet experience," you are fine with giving up anonymity? This is a definite sacrifice, don't you think?

Well, who am I giving up my anonymity to? If my information were just treated as raw data, then I would be just as anonymous as I am now. I don't see the problem with letting Google read my email if it offers a service as useful as gmail. There is, of course, a potential for abuse, but again, these companies already stake their reputation and business on the enthusiastic participation from the consumer; it isn't in their interest to betray that trust. The diagram above talks about 'radical trust'. Mutual trust is a necessary ingredient in any participatory activity.

Readers: See where I am going with this?

The internet evolves

2005-10-10T10:46:00.000-05:00

Google Reader was revealed during the Web 2.0 conference, and I suppose I should say something about that hot little catchphrase while it is still trendy.

From Tim O'Reilly: What is Web 2.0
(Yes, that O'Reilly. This article is highly recommended if you want to know what to expect from the internet in the next decade.)

Google, by contrast, began its life as a native web application, never sold or packaged, but delivered as a service, with customers paying, directly or indirectly, for the use of that service. None of the trappings of the old software industry are present. No scheduled software releases, just continuous improvement. No licensing or sale, just usage. No porting to different platforms so that customers can run the software on their own equipment, just a massively scalable collection of commodity PCs running open source operating systems plus homegrown applications and utilities that no one outside the company ever gets to see.
...

Google's service is not a server--though it is delivered by a massive collection of internet servers--nor a browser--though it is experienced by the user within the browser. Nor does its flagship search service even host the content that it enables users to find. Much like a phone call, which happens not just on the phones at either end of the call, but on the network in between, Google happens in the space between browser and search engine and destination content server, as an enabler or middleman between the user and his or her online experience.

BitTorrent thus demonstrates a key Web 2.0 principle: the service automatically gets better the more people use it. While Akamai must add servers to improve service, every BitTorrent consumer brings his own resources to the party. There's an implicit "architecture of participation", a built-in ethic of cooperation, in which the service acts primarily as an intelligent broker, connecting the edges to each other and harnessing the power of the users themselves.

If an essential part of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence, turning the web into a kind of global brain, the blogosphere is the equivalent of constant mental chatter in the forebrain, the voice we hear in all of our heads. It may not reflect the deep structure of the brain, which is often unconscious, but is instead the equivalent of conscious thought. And as a reflection of conscious thought and attention, the blogosphere has begun to have a powerful effect.

Discussion:

1) Is this a legitimate paradigm shift? Or is it just the next stage of maturation of the internet?

2) For that matter, should this primarily be seen as a reconceptualization of the internet by corporations, or a developmental stage of the internet in its own right?

3) Is Web 2.0 primarily a change in the structure of applications and services on the internet? Or is it better seen as a shift in the way the internet is used? Consider: Google does not need to target a passive audience, but active users of its service.

epic

2005-10-10T02:20:00.000-05:00

This is worth watching:

epic 2014

The term "Googlezon" would have never made it out of committee.

Discussion questions:

1) Is internet personalization is a good thing?

2) The short described personalization as a form of isolation. It seems to me that one's sphere of interests will inevitably overlap in a considerable way with other people; one will never be 'closed off'. Does targeting the internet isolate?

3) Is 2014 too soon? Too far away? Consider: Work is already underway for Google Grid.

4) Would Amoogle have been better? It is far less ominous.

Google Reads

2005-10-10T01:30:00.000-05:00

Google Reader was released in beta last week, amid zero fanfare, and is just mindblowingly awesome.

... yeah. Google is awesome.

edit: It takes a few minutes of configuring, which shouldn't be too difficult if you already use gmail and labels. But it is damn useful. For instance, after about five minutes of messing around, I found Mind Hacks, which is awesome.

Goon meet update

2005-10-09T04:35:00.000-05:00

Someone did wear Saucem-o. I feel victorious.

Photoblogging was a bust, as Nath didn't leave her camera around. I got some cellphone pics but nothing worth showing off.

But it was a good night anyway. Details to follow.

Brandon says..

2005-10-08T15:42:00.000-05:00

"I <3 me some nerds!"

Tonight's goonmeet will be supplimented by hard-hitting photoblogging.

Kubrick

2005-10-06T22:21:00.000-05:00

This is the monster A/V studio at the Beckman institute, Kubrick. Its so top secret it isn't even mentioned on the equipment list. It supposedly has 2 terabytes of storage, and 4 gigs of ram. It is slick as hell. The coming-soon MC Chris concert DVD from the Penny Arcade convention this summer is being edited here, and I got a sneak peak.

Also coming soon: Chinese Room Syndrome on DVD. Order Now.

The Blind Pi!ERROR

2005-10-05T01:03:00.000-05:00

Consider the following image:

This is the sign for a local drinkery and rathskeller, The Blind Pig. Notice the character 'g' on the word 'Pig'. It has been adjusted vertically to fit on the solid wooden beam; if it hung over, the tail of the 'g' would likely snap off for whatever reason (although the door hangs above has been sealed shut). In other words, from all outward appearances, the placement of the 'g' in this situation was based entirely off pragmatic, and not aesthetic, considerations.

Notice also that the placement of the 'g' does not change its syntactic role in the sign. It is not suddenly a capital 'G' due to its placement.

However, consider the following: a computer, designed to read characters off a sign, would come across this character in this sign and might stumble on transcription. The new character encountered does not seem to fit the expected character set. This theoretical computer expects regular (that is, digital) input, and upon encountering a deviation from that input, fails.

Such a computer is obviously impractical, for precisely that reason. But consider this: the characters before 'g' do not all fit the mold of an 'ideal' symbol. There are undoubtedly small variations in the shape and texture of the symbol that, on a more sensitive machine, might likewise produce an unexpected syntax error. Our hypothetical machine, however, is blind to these smaller deviations. Still, there are some structural properties it deems necessary for transcription, and the 'g' in this sign case violates those constraints.

To construct a machine to read signs like this, we might assume that all signs have (more or less) regular font and syntax; the novel placement of the 'g' is not something we expect to encounter, and would require an explicit rule in our machine to cover such cases. In humans, however, no such rule is required, and it is obvious to us that the assumed regularity of signs is but an artifact of the contemporary technological age; 100 years ago encountering such regularity would have been a far more surprising phenomena.

Discussion questions:

1) Suppose we construct machines that can read indefinite variations on syntax regularity- it can read signs of any form and character, including those with novel variations. It can also read nearly any example of handwriting, no matter how sloppy (within limits). I am not suggesting it can read any text and understand its meaning; rather, it simply can transcribe any instance of syntax into regular Times New Roman font. Do we consider this machine intelligent?

2) Suppose we construct another machine that can read any text and understand it completely: it can provide summaries and outlines and critical analyses of anything from Job to Joyce. However, it can only read text in Courier New font size 8, and all texts must be transcribed into that format in order to be read. Furthermore, it is extremely picky about the text itself; any smears, smudges, underlines, creases, or any other deformation of the structural properties of the text renders it totally unreadable to the machine. Do we consider this machine more or less intelligent that the machine described in 1?

3) Which do you consider the more useful machine? Which machine would you rather have? If these seem like separate questions, explain.

4) Is The Blind Pig really a rathskeller, or is it too high brow?

untitled

2005-10-04T19:13:00.000-05:00

It started off slow and in the background and it itched in a way that I couldn't scratch and I am leaning back in the seat as it wobbles on the uneven sidewalk and this is no good and I get up and take a walk and totter and pace and walk in circles and rush back to the cup on the uneven table and I slow down and totter and walk backwards and Oh, excuse me sir I didn't mean to step on you i just I JUST wanted to GO to the bathroom will you let me in please looking at my watch and he said 15 minutes and the girl he was with said something distracting from the MATTER AT HAND and I said "15 minutes no problemo" and I hung up all business and facts and casual bilingualism and I held the phone tightly and I inquired at the girl standing guard in front of the door that it was just a MOMENT for use of the BATHROOM which I clearly need to USE my good LADY and she looked over and mentioned the Fire Code and she of course had a point. I DO NOT DENY SHE HAD A POINT. So I danced the magic dance and she let me in and I quickly used the facilities and rushed back out and glanced at my glass on the wobbly table, and my watch and it was time.

And the street was lively with clowns and musicians and wanderers and evil and the street crawled with evil and I tripped down the curb and EVIL. I pulled out my phone and turned on the camera and watched the malevolent circus act perform through the comfort of my technology. The cars were blurs of sound and fury and the phone ring shocked me and he called me up to his room and the front door of the small, dirty apartment complex was open and I headed towards the music and his upside down face at the top of the stairs and he yelled 'Hey sup' and I said hey and looked around suspiciously and went into his room.

There sat a group of kids I DID NOT LOOK AT THEIR FACES and they sat there around the glowing box playing Halo and yelling and the sound of Phish was strong in the air and in the middle was a glowing metal cone with the words VOLCANO in bright read letters, and we made our exchange and they yelled and his head bobbed and his hideous girlfriend yelled into her phone I CANT HEAR YOU I CANT HEAR YOU and he filled up a large plastic bag with colorless happiness and I have to go, thanks, man, I'll... what? I, yeah, haha, yeah we'll. Yeah.

And I exited and lit a cigarette and flipped open the cell phone and watched the world through the screen of technology and it was blurry and lagged and I trusted it and it trusted me and i was still in the middle of the street and still lighting my cigarette and no cars were coming and I felt safe.

And I arrived back at my wobbly table that was full now of people with no chairs and I wanted to sit and I had no place to sit and I strolled around and the cool air felt great and the sign above the bar caught my eye and I stared and stared and people looked at me as if to ask me where I was and who I was with and was smiled at them, right to their face and I mumbled and ignored the conversation and let it wash over me like rain water and they talked about philosophers and psychoanalysis and sandwiches and I sat there and looked at the sign and took out the phone and took a picture.

passenger

2005-10-02T16:54:00.000-05:00

passenger n.
1. A person who travels in a conveyance, such as a car or train, without participating in its operation.
2. Informal. A person who participates only passively in an activity.
3. A wayfarer or traveler.

Pictures are cool

2005-09-30T00:54:00.000-05:00

BBC: Top Ten Science Pictures of the Year

Of note:

Migraine attacks can cause a variety of visual symptoms (aura) as well as the notorious stabbing head pain. This is a representation of a barn seen during an attack, painted by an artist and migraine sufferer.

Representation of panspermia - a theory that the seeds of life are found throughout the Universe, and that life arose on Earth when such seeds landed here early in geological history. The image shows eggs shattering and releasing smaller eggs.

The latter picture, while not particularly interesting in itself, did lead me to look up panspermia. Of note:

Directed Panspermia

A second prominent proponent of panspermia is Nobel prize winner Francis Crick, who along with Leslie Orgel proposed the theory of directed panspermia in 1973. This suggests that the seeds of life may have been purposely spread by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization. Crick argues that small grains containing DNA, or the building blocks of life, fired randomly in all directions is the best, most cost effective strategy for seeding life on a compatible planet at some time in the future. The strategy might have been pursued by a civilization facing catastrophic annihilation, or hoping to terraform planets for later colonization.

Discussion questions:

1) Say Crick's theory is true. Does that make us the product of intelligent design? Consider that life would not have arisen on Earth without intelligent creatures performing this terraforming technique. Consider also that such creatures would have had to send sturdy DNA molecules out in space, perhaps engineering them to survive such an ordeal.

2) Should we take it as an essential task of science to continue such terrforming techniques, whether or not it was in fact responsible for our our genesis? If so, what sorts of earth creatures would we send to space, and would we attempt to modify them significantly from their natural form?

3) Is it immature for me to giggle at the term 'panspermia'?

HUG ME

2005-09-29T22:45:00.000-05:00

A is for awesome

2005-09-28T22:08:00.000-05:00

Wired: R is for Robot

...
In the back of the lab, by a coffee table made from scrap pegboard left over from Rubi's exoskeleton, Movellan tells me in hushed tones about the epiphany that pushed him headlong into the world of affective computing. In the fall of 2002, he was working in Kyoto at ATR, the Japanese government's robot research lab, sinking deeper and deeper into the mathematics of machine perception, drifting in the intellectual tides and feeling uninspired by it all. "I was very skeptical. There was a robot there, and I didn't like it. It would say things like 'Hug me! Hug me!' It really irritated me." One day Movellan found himself using the robot to test an early version of the face-tracking program that he and Fasel developed here in La Jolla. "It worked really, really well. As I was testing it, I kept moving, and this robot kept looking at me, and his eyes moved in a particular way, and I got close, and this robot kept looking at me. And then it hugged me. And it completely got me." Movellan was shocked by the strength of his own response. "I said, 'What's happening here? I know this thing is dead. I mean, it's not alive. But I would swear that this thing is alive.'"
...

Oh God Yes

2005-09-28T02:17:00.000-05:00

I'm sure this is everywhere on the internet right now, but let me indulge in my childhood imagination.

National Geographic

...this isn't science fiction. A set of extraordinary images captured by Japanese scientists marks the first-ever record of a live giant squid (Architeuthis) in the wild.

The animal-which measures roughly 25 feet (8 meters) long- was photographed 2,950 feet (900 meters) beneath the North Pacific Ocean. Japanese scientists attracted the squid toward cameras attached to a baited fishing line.

The scientists say they snapped more than 500 images of the massive cephalopod before it broke free after snagging itself on a hook. They also recovered one of the giant squid's two longest tentacles, which severed during its struggle.

edit: that leaves us 2/3rds of the way to the dream scenario:

What the hell are C-fibers?

2005-09-27T19:30:00.000-05:00

They are free nerve endings.

C-fibers are unmyeliniated and as a result, have a slower conduction velocity; lower than 2 m/s. These fibers are associated with chronic or dull pain. C-fibers are associated with sensations of cold, as well as mechanical and chemical stimuli. The density for cold receptors in the skin is greater than the density of warm-receptors (by a factor of 5). It is thought that most or all C fibers are nocireceptors (responding only to noxious stimuli).

In contrast:

Aδ fibres are thin, myelinated fibers with a large conduction velocity (2 to 30 m/s) and are associated with acute pain. In a real life situation, this is the sharp pain that triggers reflexes which result in the "pulling away" from the stimuli (ie: yanking hand away from hot stove). A certain proportion of Aδ fibers are also associated with sensations of heat and pressure.

Discussion questions:

1) Should philosophers switch to Aδ fibers firing as physical correlates for pain?

2) Do you think Kripke was a masochist based on his use of C rather than Aδ fibers?

Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia

2005-09-26T23:57:00.000-05:00

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was interviewed on C-SPAN last night. You can read the transcript and watch the interview on the same page. Of interest:

LAMB: As I was doing - well, using Wikipedia to do the research for this interview I kept thinking when will Google or Yahoo! put Jimmy Wales out of business. And then I - as I read further, you're in business with them in some way.

WALES: Yes, in some way. I think we have - we're a non-profit organization that I founded. And we've gotten support from Yahoo! already and Google is very interested in supporting us. We're just still talking to them about what to do.

And Yahoo! has donated some servers. And I think what's interesting about that is that if you - you know, it's almost a joke but it's completely true. If you think about well why - why do Yahoo! and Google want to do this and well, their business model depends on the Internet not sucking and we hope the Internet not suck. So it's that the Wikipedia for a lot of people hearkens back to what we all thought the Internet was for in the first place which is, you know, when most people first started the Internet they thought oh, this is fantastic, people can communicate from all over the world and build knowledge and share information.

And then we went through the whole dot-com boom and bust and the Internet seemed to be about pop-up ads, and SPAM, and porn and selling dog food over the Internet. And now Wikipedia kind of hearkens back to the original vision of the Internet.

And so it's important for the whole business of the entire Internet that there be quality resources that people can turn to and want to turn to. So that's - it's important to these companies to support us.

WALES: Right.

LAMB: Do you happen to know - I tried to find it yesterday and you can't get into Alexa to do this.

WALES: Yes.

LAMB: At least - you have to pay for it I guess now?

WALES: Oh, no, I think it's still ...

LAMB: Is it still available?

WALES: ... last I checked I think we're around 40th now.

LAMB: 40th in the world ..

WALES: Yes, in the world.

LAMB: ... the busiest ...

WALES: Yes, according to Alexa.

LAMB: ... 40th busiest Web site.

WALES: Yes, which puts us - if you look at the numbers for reach, meaning the number of unique visitors that we see in a - in a day, you know, if you compare us to the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, we're larger than all of those, but even more than that we're larger than all of those combined. So that's the number of people we're reaching globally every day. It's substantial.

LAMB: How many people work for Wikipedia?

WALES: One. Its not me.

The discussion about the constraining rules of the encyclopedia is also quite interesting.

Thanks to toliverchap for telling me about this.

Birthday Blog Post

2005-09-25T11:35:00.000-05:00

According to Wikipedia, Sandra Day O'Conner was sworn in as the first female Supreme Court Justice on the exact date of my birth. My birthday is shared with:

1897 - William Faulkner
1930 - Shel Silverstein
1931 - Barbara Walters
1932 - Glenn Gould
1951 - Mark Hamill
1952 - Christopher Reeve
1965 - Scottie Pippen
1968 - Will Smith
1969 - Catherine Zeta-Jones

Curiously, no one born on my birthday since 1978 is worth Wikipedia mention, and no one since 1970 is of any significant importance (Hal Sparks doesn't count). Perhaps I am not so much a slacker but just subject to the whim of astrology.

Also, today is 'Armed Forces Day' im Mozambique.

Turing the tables

2005-09-24T15:11:00.000-05:00

I just wanted to clarify something about my position. During the Goodman reading group Dave commented on how part of my project was to redefine the Turing Test in such a way as to recognize that machines already pass it. Dave suggested that this sort of philosophical analysis could be used to cash in on Loebner Prize and other science awards and make a tidy profit in the name of philosophical progress. I say we try to defend a Leibnizian theodicy and get our hands on one of them Nobel Peace prizes.

Kidding aside, it would be absurd to say that machines currently pass the Turing test, understood in the conventional way. The Turing test as implemented in the Loebner contest is concieved as a test for linguistic competence, where being able to fool a human that the computer is also human indicates a certain degree of intelligence. But machines clearly have no linguistic competence whatsoever. Machines still have a long way to go before they can be considered intelligent speakers.

It is worth noting, however, that the prize for this test doesn't go to the computer, but to the designers (as opposed to, for instance, dog shows, where the dog itself is considered the champion, and not its breeder). And this is the source of my objection to the traditional interpretation of the Turing test.

Turing originally conceived of the test as a game to be played by humans and computers, and the computer's intelligence is judged relative to how well it played the game, both by the standards of the game and by the willingness of its human collaborator to attribute to it intelligence in playing the game. Turing thought that written language was sufficiently medium independent to be an objective determining factor in judging intelligence, but the idea of language use itself wasn't the focus of his imitation game. The point more generally is: how well can computers act like humans? With some of our more complicated behavior like language, the computers have a ways to go. With our more basic activities, computers are trotting along with us just fine, if not better.

Two points to make on this:

1) All that shit about the supposed 'singularity' is just stupid, because if machines do something radically different than us (even if it is in some sense 'better') we just wont consider it an intelligence anymore. In other words, an 'incomprehensible intelligence' is not intelligent at all.

2) Computers try and keep up with us, just as much as we try and keep up with them. In other words, there is no static thing that it is to "act like a human". Thus, humans and machines are inevitably bound together in symbiotic evolution.

thumbsuck

2005-09-22T20:02:00.000-05:00

My thumbnail thinks terrible thoughts
and on those thoughts I thrive
I shove it in my slimy mouth
and suck its supply dry.

Ripping round the cuticle
'til red raw tears remain
it quenches quite deliciously
and keeps quality thoughts away.

Google gets sued

2005-09-21T15:55:00.000-05:00

CNET News: Authors Guild sues Google over library project

Response from Google Blog.

A bit more background: CNN - Google's digital library tests law

I went to the Chuck D and Hilary Rosen debate last night on file sharing. Rosen's argument was basically the standard "Its stealing guys. Stealing is wrong", while Chuck D's main argument was "CORPORATIONS". Neither seemed to have very strong opinions either way, and both conceeded a lot of points to the other side.

Of note was Rosen's rather condescending criticism of today's youth that, of all the important issues of the day we make stealing our rallying cause. I find that opinion to be very dismissive and unsympathetic to the legitimate complaints of the consumers. Stealing isn't right, and I am saying that as an unapologetic pirate of movies, music, tv, and porn. That doesn't excuse the authoritarian control the media has put over access and availability of their content- things like iPod is only compatible with iTunes, and that most media content isn't available on the net by any legal means.

Chuck D is clearly a business man, and understands that the system has to work to some extent in the way it does; his complaint was simply that the music industry has been horribly mismanaged at the expense of both the artist and the consumer, which is just bad from both a creative and business standpoint- except to the executives at the top who are making truckloads of cash. D made a good point: making music digital (on CDs) made information liquid, and the pandora's box has been opened. But from 1988 to 1998, the music industry made a shit load of money selling and reselling people's record collection back to them on shiny discs. The affect of that quick money making scheme is just catching up to them now.

D also said a few times "Technology giveth, technology taketh away." I dont know if he is a religious man, but I found it very satisfying to hear.

So today Google gets sued by the Author's Guild, over Google Print, which is really just a fabulous resource. Although the cases aren't exactly parallel, the issue of IP rights vs the freedom of information strikes again. This time it isn't a bunch of snotty, poor college students but The Company That Can Do No Wrong. It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

Discussion questions:

1) Is Google stealing content? Is the digitalization of information inherently dangerous to the means of production? Does the Author's Guild have a legitimate complaint?

2) How will a decision on this case affect copyright laws in general, and IP issues specifically?

3) Is access to information a right? Are attempts to thwart the control of information flow ever unwarranted?

5) Is there a legitimate analogy between the Google case and the file-sharing cases (Grokster, etc), or is this connection just going to be over-played in the media? Will the Grokster decision bear on this case, or vice-versa?

Red hot

2005-09-20T12:17:00.000-05:00

"Collaborating with machines" by Tom Jenkinson.

AKA: Squarepusher

The old preconceptions of machines (ie: drum machines, samplers, software) as inhibitive to "genuine" creativity/ "soulless" etc. are now quickly evaporating. The machine facilitates creativity, yes, but a specific kind of creativity that has undermined the idea of a composer who is master of and indifferent to his tools - the machine has begun to participate. Any die-hard instumentalists that still struggle to retain their notion of human sovereignty are exemplifying a peculiarly (western) human stupidity - resistance to the inevitable. What is also clear, though certainly undesirable by any retaining an anthropocentric view of composition is that this process proceeds regardless of any ideal point of human-machine collaboration (ie one where the human retains any degree of importance.) One might say that music is imploding in preparation for a time when there is no longer any need for it.

As is commonly percieved, the relationship between a human operator and a machine is such that the machine is a tool, an instrument of the composers desires. Implicit in this, and generally unquestioned until recently, is the sovereignty of the composer. What is now becoming clear is that the composer is as much a tool as the tool itself, or even a tool for the machine to manifest its desires. I do not mean this in the sense that machines are in possesion of a mind capable of subtly directing human behaviour, but in the sense that the attributes of the machine are just as prominent an influence in the resulting artefact as the user is; through his work, a human operator brings as much about the machine to light as he does about himself. However, this is not to say that prior to electronic mechanisation, composers were free and unfettered in their creations. As a verbal langauge facilitates and constricts our thoughts, the musical tradition, language and the factors of its realisation(ie instrumentation, limits of physical ability) were just as active participants in the compositional process as the "composer" was.
...

The problematic relationship between humans and machines stems from the abject remnants of the modernist idea that we can control our fates, perfect ourselves and our surroundings, postpone or eventually eradicate death. (Anyone who is afraid of dying needs salvation, but not as they might say, from death, but in fact from life, and of course a retreat into dogma suits this purpose very well). This view holds that anything can ultimately be made a subject of our conscious will. However, bending something to our conscious will, whether that is a person, a machine, or a situation always manifests a compensatory and contradictory aspect. Something crops up which subverts our will. Yet it is never admitted that such subvertions are simply the corollary of our obsession with conscious direction of our surroundings and thus the idiocy continues.
...

One might say that the western tradition simultaneously holds
anthropocentric views and yet makes scientific discoveries that continually point out that we are the center of nothing at all. (In that sense, we are all schizoid - we are all irreperably split, it is simply a matter of how you deal with it.) The use of machines has completed the abolition of anthopocentricity in a radical manner - that we are no longer even the centers of ourselves. Creativity does not seem to be an exclusively human activity anymore, but that begs the question, was it ever?

Discussion questions:

1) Can machines be creative? If not, how do we characterize the contributions and collaborations with machines in creative endeavors?

2) If we are the center of nothing at all, what are we? If creativity is not exclusively ours, are we anything at all?

Common knowledge

2005-09-19T11:15:00.000-05:00

CNET News: Intelligence in the Internet age

A few thousand years ago, a Greek philosopher, as he snacked on dates on a bench in downtown Athens, may have wondered if the written language folks were starting to use was allowing them to avoid thinking for themselves.

Today, terabytes of easily accessed data, always-on Internet connectivity, and lightning-fast search engines are profoundly changing the way people gather information. But the age-old question remains: Is technology making us smarter? Or are we lazily reliant on computers, and, well, dumber than we used to be?

"Our environment, because of technology, is changing, and therefore the abilities we need in order to navigate these highly information-laden environments and succeed are changing," said Susana Urbina, a professor of psychology at the University of North Florida who has studied the roots of intelligence.

If there is a good answer to the question, it probably starts with a contradiction: What makes us intelligent--the ability to reason and learn--is staying the same and will never fundamentally change because of technology. On the other hand, technology, from pocket calculators to the Internet, is radically changing the notion of the intelligence necessary to function in the modern world.
...

What's undeniable is the Internet's democratization of information. It's providing instant access to information and, in a sense, improving the practical application of intelligence for everyone.

Nearly a century ago, Henry Ford didn't have the Internet, but he did have a bunch of smart guys. The auto industry pioneer, as a parlor trick, liked to claim he could answer any question in 30 minutes. In fact, he had organized a research staff he could call at any time to get him the answer.

Today, you don't have to be an auto baron to feign that kind of knowledge. You just have to be able to type G-O-O-G-L-E. People can in a matter of minutes find sources of information like court documents, scientific papers or corporate securities filings.

"The notion that the world's knowledge is literally at your fingertips is very compelling and is very beguiling," said Vint Cerf, who co-created the underlying architecture of the Internet and who is widely considered one of its "fathers." What's exciting "is the Internet's ability to absorb such a large amount of information and for it to be accessible to other people, even if they don't know it exists or don't know who you are."

Indeed, Doug Engelbart, one of the pioneers of personal computing technology in the 1960s, envisioned in the early '60s that the PC would augment human intelligence. He believes that society's ability to gain insight from information has evolved with the help of computers.

"The key thing about all the world's big problems is that they have to be dealt with collectively," Engelbart said. "If we don't get collectively smarter, we're doomed."
...

"We might one day sit around and reminisce about having to remember phone numbers, but it's not a bad thing. It frees us up to think about other things. The brain has a limited capacity, if you give it high-level tools, it will work on high-level problems," [Hawkins] said.

Technology hasn't taught us any new facts. Google doesn't (at least directly) discover truths about the world. It isn't even that important that information has become accessible. The key change here is that information has become accessible to everyone, and thus the epistemic standards we hold a person to have rise across the board.

Discussion questions:

1) Division of labor was for Plato an essential feature of the polis. When that labor is divided among machines, and when machines in fact provide the bulk of that labor (both mechanical and intellectual), should machines still be excluded from membership in that society?

2) The necessity of education in society means that the human as it is born is itself not sufficient for membership. The human must also be domesticated into the culture and conventions of the society, which includes a certain amount of common knowledge. Today that includes mathematical and linguistic knowledge as more or less non-negotiable requirements. Tomorrow, that common knowledge might extend to incorporate the information freely available on the net. This seems to imply that domestication will require significant integration with technology as a non-negotiable pre-requisite. Do such considerations affect your answer to 1 above?

The virtual market

2005-09-18T15:18:00.000-05:00

Discussion of the Post article: Virtual Games Create A Real World Market

D&D thread

Kellen's auction is just one example of how increasingly popular online role-playing games have created a shadow economy in which the lines between the real world and the virtual world are getting blurred. More than 20 million people play these games worldwide, according to Edward Castronova, an economics professor at Indiana University who has written a book on the subject, and he thinks such gamers spend more than $200 million a year on virtual goods. One site, GameUSD.com, even tracks the latest value of computer-game currency against the U.S. dollar, an exchange-rate calculator for the virtual world.
...

After Hurricane Katrina, the operators of EverQuest II assured more than 13,000 members in the Gulf Coast region that their virtual property would be protected and preserved until they could resume playing.
...

Koster pointed out that it's not necessarily in the game's best interest to imitate the real-world economy, in which the point is to get money so you don't have to do things. In the gaming world, the point is to do stuff. That's the fun of playing.

"The economies in the real world are designed to grow and progress toward an improved standard of living so that eventually you don't have to slay dragons for food -- you go to a supermarket and get dragon burgers.

"We don't want people to get to a point where they just go out for dragon burgers," he said. "That would not make for an interesting game."

Ensuing discussion:

Rheingold posted:
To me the biggest problem about "virtual" items is the lack of a legal framework dealing with these items.

So should we standardize vitrual currency?

Rheingold posted:
I actually favour the extension of the "normal" property rights (to a certain degree) to "virtual" items because I see no need to distinguish between the two. No need to create something new to protect "virtual" items.

Eris_Is_Goddess posted:
Considering the roleplaying involved, social engineering "theft" should be no more illegal than virtual murder. If the theft involves real-life chicanery, that's something altogether different.

Rheingold posted:
Yeah, that's what I want to. In-Game stealing is ok with me. Hacking accounts and selling the loot on ebay is not.

So then we are drawing a line between real life and virtual life?

Rheingold posted:
Certainly, it's still a game and games (virtual or non-virtual) have rules. I can "take" your bishop while playing chess like I can "take" your Deathblade playing some online MMORPG. As long as it happens within the framework of the rules of the game it's ok.

Well, the point here is how to distinguish between the rules of the game and the larger context in which the game occurs. Surely trading characters isn't part of the rules of the game, which is why people like Baron complain about the practice. But in the context of the free market, such things do have value and can be traded accordingly. So which rules do we hold as operative? Its not as simple as saying 'when you play the game, follow the rules of the game', because the whole question is how to delineate the game itself.

This isn't just a problem with the virtual world. It would be analogous to the Roman empire saying that only Roman money can be used in its borders, and any place that uses Roman money is part of Rome. So what about merchants on the trade routes to Rome? There are incentives for the trade mechants to accept any type of money, as long as there are reliable ways to convert it to Roman money. Does that make the merchants part of Rome? Either way, they are violating the rules.

The simple answer would be to just standardize the virtual currency so we have reliable conversions to, for instance, USD. So when you are trading geldings (or whatever), you are really trading USD under a different name. This way there really are one set of rules governing all transactions. You seem to think that this kind of regulation isn't necessary, but without it we face the problem of which rules are operative in which contexts, and that seems an intractable problem.

This is an interesting issue. I'm not sure what to make of it.