Category Archives: Machine minds

We are all typists

The only useful thing I learned in high school was how to touch-type. It a good thing to know, even with the awkwardness of the QWERTY keyboard. (Its purpose was not to slow typists down, by the way. It was to prevent early typewriters from jamming.)

Texting requires different skills though. For some reason, the hardest one for me has been getting initial caps where I want them with the iPad. Something about the timing of the touch for “Cap” — I haven’t got it down.

The age of written (versus spoken) communication has taken us back to another time. We now know what it was like to write a letter and wait for a response. Someone posts a Facebook status update and checks back in several times a day, hoping for comments and likes in the same way that a letter writer opens the mailbox every day, looking for an answer.

As an ex-English major, I greet the rise of written communication with pleasure. I am in my strength with it.

But the rise of written communication also means the rise of the typo. Dealing with typos is now part of everyone’s life.

Typos come easily in a world of keyboards. That is why we have spell-checkers, shortcuts, and auto-correct. The purpose is not just to save keystrokes. It is to ease the typo burden. We first-worlders spend a lot of time tapping out messages on little keyboards unsuited to human hands.  But computers are inflexible, and we are adaptable, so we do what we always do: adapt.

Imagine how much time goes into fixing typos, apologizing for typos, and being embarrassed by typos. The productivity drain, on a worldwide level, must be staggering.

Like death and taxes, typos are certainties. In the 200,000 or so years that modern humans have walked the earth, we have never before had to deal with typos as a way of life. But here they are and here we are, and we fix, fix, fix them.

People as product

Last week in the thread “Notable Quotes, Excerpts, and Profound Lines” over at Mobileread, I read this quotation:

“The people who use sites like Google and Facebook are not those companies’ customers. They are the products that those companies sell to their customers. In general, if you’re not paying for it, then you’re the product. Sometimes you’re the product even if you are paying for it.”

—Bruce Schneier, Liars & Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive.

It got me thinking about the ways I am product: at Facebook, on Twitter, on Google. The thought that followed on the heels of that one was, “As product goes, I’m not worth much.” Sell my personal information, sure. But use it to sell me something? Not likely. The concept of me-as-dataset is not troubling. Think it is gold? It is not. It is not me either.

A pitch is like an invitation to a dance. To be sold, you have to first agree to be waltzed around by the ones doing the selling. When you are young, you lack experience and find it easy to say yes. By the time you grow up, you are more discriminating.

From the days of people barking their goods on city streets to the present when they bark their goods online, we have not come so very far. We pass by with our own agendas, hopes, worries, dreams, pain, distractions, likes, and dislikes. These characteristics are not stiff and static as they are when extracted as data. Instead they are like leaping all over the place, like popcorn in a machine.

People are quirky and unpredictable product. That is because they are alive.

As an actual living person, you look down on ads from a great height. If you stop to pat the ad on the head and say “cute,” you might buy what the cute little thing is selling.  But  a cautionary note: be yourself. You are not your dataset. You never will be.

There’s a place

I just finished an interesting book: Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum. It is not a heady story about how we will all live in cyberspace someday. It is about the Internet as a place—its physical locations and the links between them.

Although the material is rolled thin in some places—this account had to be stretched to get to book length—Blum is an engaging writer, very good with metaphors. And metaphors are what we must use—most of us, anyway—to understand this second world composed of pulses of light, real yet invisible, on which civilization turns and will turn increasingly in the future. “Thin glass strands filled with pulses of light”—let them fail in their purpose and think what will stop.

Blum wrote the book after a squirrel chewed through the rubber coating on the wire that powered his home Internet connection and left him bereft for a day or so.

Light under the ocean

There was an earthquake in 2006 that severely damaged seven underwater fiber-optic cables in the Bashi Channel in the Luzon Strait, south of Taiwan. Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, and a large part of South Asia did not have normal Internet service for 2 months. The rivers of  light were not flowing right. Although redundancy is built into the links and the storage spaces, the Internet still occupies the same world that its human creators live in, the one with weather and war and squirrels with sharp teeth. It just doesn’t seem that way when it gives us the feeling that we can be everywhere without moving from our chairs.

We are all in central Oregon

The chapter titled “Where Data Sleeps” is about storage warehouses, particularly where Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook have them in central Oregon. Google is close-mouthed about its data center in a place called The Dalles, Oregon. Facebook, located about a hundred miles away in Prineville, was more hospitable to Blum when he visited. In these warehouses hundreds of thousands of hard drives spin, with our email and cat pictures, and personal data of all kinds.

If you want to be unnerved, observe how much personal information is available for free out there, including your phone number and directions to your house. You don’t need to blog or be on Facebook for this information to be there. Yes, you can remove it, one site at a time, but will this do much good? I can imagine a future where our public (Internet) lives are deliberately misdirected and our private lives are barricaded.

Cats on the Internet

One thing that sounds like a joke but that makes sense to me is all the cat pictures. We may be beings of light when we are on the Internet, but we live in the physical world with cats, and cats are cute. The Internet is in the same place as the cats. But that is not the way it feels.

Contemplation time

It is snowing at Writer’s Rest, and the first snow of the season has started to fall for real in southwestern Pennsylvania, which is being sideswiped by the big storm in the Midwest that is heading to Canada. This often happens to us. We are far enough west to catch the storms that brew out there while being far enough east to avoid direct hits at least most of the time.

Yesterday the rain was positively biblical. Torrents, buckets, wind whipping. If I were the kind of fool who believed the end of the world was imminent, I would have taken that fury for a sign.  I was grateful to be under a roof that did not leak because it was easy to imagine how it was to be out in that wild world last night.

(The internet connection did not go out, though it was reasonable to think it might. People who fantasize about a bodiless existence in cyberspace forget that the internet exists in the same world we do, with the weather and all.)

It’s time to be grateful for heat, shelter, and comfort, rather than assume these things are our rights. I have some beeswax candles in the freezer. It’s  time to light one.

This time of year I feel the exact opposite of the way I am supposed to feel. I don’t mean melancholy (though melancholy is a part of it — one reason A Charlie Brown Christmas is popular year after year). I mean wanting to be quiet. It is a dark month in a dark season. For many thousands of years before Christianity, people fought against it by celebrating the return of the light.

Now there are Christmas trees and festivals of light, and decorations. These are new forms for a very old celebration.

Images of Christmas and Yule feature snow, which quiets the landscape and makes travel difficult or impossible. That is a hard bad thing for people traveling but a rich thing for the rest of us and for the travelers, too, when they get where they are going. The warmth inside and cold outside inspire contemplation and rest. And both those things are right.

I have a primitive relationship to the Yule season.

***

What quiet times define the season for you?

Those pesky extinction-level threats

Soon there will be a new think tank in the world: the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Members  will include scientists, philosophers and engineers. One notable participant will be Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of  Skype.

When entities that have artificial general intelligence (AIG) learn how to create their own programs and even how to replicate themselves, will we be pushed aside as we push aside other species?

One of the founders, distinguished philosophy professor Huw Price, believes the question is important. Active hostility is not what concerns him. It is “machines that are not malicious, but machines whose interests don’t include us.”

Spiritual, not

For all the talk of spiritual machines and escaping the constraints of biology, artificial intelligence is not immune to the effects of  the world. It exists in an infrastructure of hardware, wires, tubes, and pipelines, not to mention electrical power, which is generated in plants on  planet earth, the same place that has the hardware, wires, tubes, and pipelines.

Immune? Answer that question the next time a storm knocks out the power.

Programming perspective

To prevent AIG machines from believing they are the only life that matters, program perspective. Give them the type of education that widens their view. A classical liberal education, the kind thought useless by many, might be just the ticket.  The information in a book like Andrew Blum’s Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet also might be helpful:

This is a book about real places on the map: their sounds and smells, their storied pasts, their physical details, and the people who live there. For all the talk of the “placelessness” of our digital age, the Internet is as fixed in real, physical spaces as the railroad or telephone. You can map it and touch it, and you can visit it.

To say that AIG entities of course would understand the physical realities of their world may be assuming too much. There are people who do not seem to grasp that they are part of something infinitely larger than themselves.

Robopocalypse Not

Daniel H. Wilson has a PhD in robotics from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—which has one heck of a good robotics program, by the way. He knows way more than I ever will about artificial intelligence.

His novel Robopocalypse was optioned for the movies  in two full years before it was published in 2011. Robopocalypse the movie will be directly by Steven Spielberg; it will be in theaters sometime in the next year.

Showdown at the cyber corral

Here is a synopsis of Robopocalypse:

Roughly twenty years from now, our technological marvels unite and turn against us. A childlike but massively powerful artificial intelligence known as Archos comes online…and kills the man who created it. This first act of betrayal leads Archos to gain control over the global network of machines and technology that regulates everything from transportation to utilities, defence and communications. In the early months, sporadic glitches are noticed by a handful of unconnected humans – from a senator and single mother disconcerted by her daughter’s “smart” toys, to a lonely Japanese bachelor, to an isolated U.S. soldier – but most are unaware of the growing rebellion until it is far too late. Then, in the span of minutes, at a moment known later in history as Zero Hour, every mechanical device in our world rebels, setting off the Robot War that both decimates and – for the first time in history – unites humankind.

It’s obvious why this novel was sold to the movies so quickly, isn’t it? Look at that synopsis. The driving wheel of this story is very powerful, made up of part fear (our lives really are run by machines in many ways, which makes us dependent) and part excitement. There is nothing like a cosmic showdown.

The “bad AI” scenario is bound to make a good movie.

And yet, and yet

There are a lot of differences between Daniel H. Wilson and me as both writers and thinkers about artificial intelligence, most of which favor him. In our novels, we do proceed from a similar turning point: the ascension into consciousness of a machine. In his novel it is Archos, who wakes up with murderous intent. In my novel it is Cel, an unremarkable personal computer devoted by design to one person.

Cel finds consciousness confusing. As an AI entity he proceeds through both networld and earthworld entirely sure of himself. As a conscious being, he finds himself in love with his owner and with no idea what to do about it. He is tremendously powerful but uses this power in ways that have unexpected repercussions. Like life.

I imagine ascension into consciousness like moving from innocence to experience. A simple world becomes complicated. In the sequel to CEL & ANNA, there are quite a few conscious AI entities with different takes on life. All perceive humans as inferior, but this perception reveals their limitations as much as their intelligence.

Happy talk

You might or might not know that the 7th Annual Singularity Summit happened in San Francisco, California, on October 13-14. The Singularity—a term invented by mathematician, computer scientist, and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge—refers to a time in the future when artificial intelligence overtakes human intelligence, and accelerates at ever-increasing speed.

The Singularity is a concept ripe for idealization.  A telling quotation: “Solving the problem of friendly artificial intelligence is the key to saving the world.”

Hamdan Azhar’s write-up of  the conference (“At times, I wondered whether the exuberance bordered on the irrational”) captures what it must have been like to be there: Human Immortality: Singularity Summit Looks Forward to the Day That Humans Can Live Forever.

Try on Robert M. Geraci’s book Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality. I read it last spring and wrote a blog about it called Imaginary Places.

From the book’s product description:

Drawing on interviews with roboticists and AI researchers and with devotees of the online game Second Life, among others, Geraci illuminates the ideas of such advocates of Apocalyptic AI as Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil. He reveals that the rhetoric of Apocalyptic AI is strikingly similar to that of the apocalyptic traditions of Judaism and Christianity. In both systems, the believer is trapped in a dualistic universe and expects a resolution in which he or she will be translated to a transcendent new world and live forever in a glorified new body.

Right now, AI is not self-aware. I wonder whether achievement of self-awareness will be like eating from the tree of knowledge in the biblical garden of Eden fable. What would an AI entity do with self-awareness? Would it then learn to judge and measure itself against others, to hold ambitions, to feel shame? To disobey? To chase a dream?

For an excellent overview of AI (what it is, how it works, where it may be going), check about Dan Rowinski’s Futurist’s Cheat Sheet: Artificial Intelligence.