Category: Philosophy of Computing

Singularity University: Exponential Silliness 2.0?

Ray Kurzweil, who has been predicting “spiritual machines” (AI) for a while now, has been appointed Chancellor of the Singularity University. The Singularity University is based at the Nasa Ames and supported by Google (and Moses Znaimer, another visionary wannabe.) It’s mission is to focus on exponential advances leading to singularities where you get a paradigm shift. The Overview describes the aims of the University thus:

Singularity University aims to assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges.

The University thus seems dedicated to a particular, and questionable view of technological development which looks to a future of dramatic paradigm shifts triggered by these singularities. For example, the goal of the Academic Track “Future Studies & Forecasting” is “cultivating the student’s ‘exponential intuition’ — the ability to fully grasp the magnitude of possible outcomes likely to arise in specific domains.” No room here for modesty or skepticism.

The University is not really a University. It is more of an institute funded by commercial partners and providing intensive programs to graduate students and, importantly, executives. I’m surprised NASA is supporting it and legitimating something that seems a mix of science and science fiction – maybe they have too much room at their Ames campus and need some paying tenants. Perhaps in California such future speculation doesn’t seem so silly. I guess we will have to wait until about 2045 when the intelligence singularity is supposed to happen and see.

But what is the Singularity? The Wikipedia article on Technological Singularity quotes I. J. Good as describing the “intelligence explosion” that would constitute the singularity thus:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

The key for an intelligence singularity (as opposed to other types) is the recursive effect of the feedback loop when a machine is smart enough to improve itself. That is when we go from change (whether accelerating exponentially or not) to the independent evolution of intelligent machines. That is when they won’t need us to get better and we could become redundant. Such dramatic shifts are what the Singularity University prepares paying executives for and trains graduate students to accelerate.

It is easy to make fun of these ideas, but we need to be careful that we don’t end up confidently predicting that they can’t happen. Kurzweil is no fool and he bases his prediction on extrapolations of Moore’s law. Futurology will always be risky, but everyone has to do it to some degree. For that matter there do seem to be moments of accelerating technological change leading to dramatic paradigm shifts so we shouldn’t be so sure Kurzweil is wrong about the next one. I should add that I like the proposed interdisciplinarity of the Singularity University – the idea is that dramatic change or new knowledge can come from ideas that cross disciplines. This second organizing principle of the University has legs in this time of new and shifting disciplines. We need experiments like this. I just wish the Singularity University had had the courage to include academic tracks with the potential for critical engagement with the idea of an intelligence singularity. Why not a “History and Philosophy of Futurology” track that can call into question the very named premise of the University? After all, a real university should be built on an openness of mind we would call intelligence, not dogmatic certainty in a prediction.

Rebooting Computing Manifesto

On the subject of manifestos, one of my students pointed me to a project Peter Denning is leading that has a Rebooting Computing Manifesto. The project is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (of the USA) and is aimed at trying to reinvigorate computer science in the face of dramatic drops in enrollment.

It is a time of challenges for the computing field. We are tired of hearing that a computing professional is little more than a program coder or a system administrator; or that a college or graduate education is unnecessary; or that entering the computing field is a social death. We are dismayed that K-12 students, especially girls, have such a negative perception of computing. We are alarmed by reports that the innovation rate in our field has been declining and that enrollments in our degree programs have dropped 50% since 2001. Instead of the solo voice of the programmer, we would like to hear from the choir of mathematicians, engineers,and scientists who make up the bulk of our field.

I like how this is articulated as a challenge. I also like the can-do approach of gathering and coming up with ideas.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research

Stan pointed me to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research which has a number of fine articles.

  • “Cityspace, Cyberspace, and the Spatiology of Information” by Michael L. Benedikt is a reprint of a classic paper where he argues that,

    If we wish to reach deeply into the “nature” of “space itself” then, I believe we must allow into it, as it were, a substance of some sort: not the æther of nineteenth-century science perhaps, but a registering, tracing, questioning, remembering substance, spread as thinly as we can imagine, but present nonetheless, and definitive of here versus there because of how it pools, how it vibrates, how it scatters difference, différance. (p. 2)

    That substance is information. As he puts it later, “ultimately, the space in information and the information in space are one.” (p. 15)

  • “Toward a Definition of ‘Virtual Worlds'” by Mark W Bell is a short “Think Piece” defining “virtual worlds” as “A synchronous, persistent network of people, represented as avatars, facilitated by networked computers.” (p. 2)

These two pieces make an interesting contrast since Benedikt focuses on space and Bell manages to define virtual worlds without any reference to space. Benedikt calls for architects to engage in the design of virtual spaces while Bell focuses on the network of avatars – or the people within the space (and persistent time.)

Ever since the Gartner press release saying that “80 Percent of Active Internet Users Will Have A “Second Life” in the Virtual World by the End of 2011″ there has been a renewed interest in virtual worlds. My sense is that the 1990s interest in virtual reality was overblown and ultimately wrong in that people predicted we would be manipulating information inside virtual worlds with VR interfaces, data-gloves, headsets and so on. What has emerged instead is the proliferation of massive multiplayer online environments from games like World of Warcraft to social/creative spaces like Second Life. The headsets and torture apparatus of Lawnmower Man are gone, thank you!

Image of Book CoverSo … what is next? I’ve just finished Halting State by Charles Stross which is a near-future detective story set in Edinburgh where players can move their avatars from game to game in the Zone (something actually proposed by Linden Labs and IBM – see Lohr Free the Avatars – this reference is from the Messinger, Stroulia and Lyons article “A Typology of Virtual Worlds” in the JCWR.) What is more interesting is the way Stross imagines the overlay of virtual and real worlds. Everyone, including cops, wear glasses that provide augmented reality views on the world they walk through, including the ability to see people in their in-game avatar representation while, for example, at a trade fair. Stross does a imaginative job or weaving the virtual into everyday life. (If you like this book you should also read Accelerando – a great accelerating run through the artificial life as it leaves meat behind.)

Walter Ong Defining the Humanities for Congress

Man can even reflect upon his own earlier reflections as these are registered in books and elsewhere. All this is what ultimately the humanistic subjects deal with: Mankind’s life world, [page break] everything around and in men and women insofar as it affects or is affected by human consciousness.

The humanities–and I think we should get this clear–are not defined by being set against a field of science and technology presumably hostile to them. This is a fashionable, but essentially cheap, way of treated both fields.Walter Ong, “Defining the Humanities for Congress”

Browsing through the Notes from the Walter Ong Collection I came across an extended quote from Ong’s address to Congress from 1978 when he was president of the MLA. The address was in support of a resolution to authorize the President to call a conference on the humanities. Walter Ong quotes a definition of the humanities which he wants to play with,

The joint resolution introduced by Mr. Brademas on October 27, 1977, in the House of Representatives follows Congress description of 1965 in stating that:

“The term “humanities” includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history, jurisprudence; philosophy; archeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism, theory, and practice of the arts; those aspects of the social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life.”

He then goes on to conclude,

However, if the humanities need technology, technology also needs the humanities. For technology calls for more than technological thinking, as our present ecological crises remind us. Technology demands reflection on itself in relation to the entire human life world. Such reflection is no longer merely technology, it includes the humanities even though it needs to be done especially by scientists and technologies.

Ong, Walter J. “Statement of Rev. Walter J. Ong, Professor of English and Professor of Humanities in Psychiatry at St. Louis University; and President, Modern Language Association of America.” White House Conference on the Humanities. Joint Hearings before the Subcommittee on Select Education of the Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives, and the Subcommittee on Education, Arts and Humanities of the Committee on Human Resources, United States Senate, Ninety-Fifth Congress, First and Second Session, on H.J Res. 639 to Authorize the President to call a White House Conference on the Humanities. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978. 684-88.

Cybersyn: Before the Coup, Chile Tried to Find the Right Software for Socialism

Image of Cybersyn Opsroom

In New York for my last f2f meeting of the MLA Committee on Information Technology I got a New York Times with an intriguing article about a Chilean management system, Cybersyn, titled Before the Coup, Chile Tried to Find the Right Software for Socialism.

Cybersyn was born in July 1971 when Fernando Flores, then a 28-year-old government technocrat, sent a letter to Mr. Beer seeking his help in organizing Mr. Allende’s economy by applying cybernetic concepts. Mr. Beer was excited by the prospect of being able to test his ideas.

He wanted to use the telex communications system – a network of teletypewriters – to gather data from factories on variables like daily output, energy use and labor “in real time,” and then use a computer to filter out the important pieces of economic information the government needed to make decisions.

Cybersyn was apparently semi-functional before the coup that overthrew Allende’s government and it was used to help manage around the small-business and truckers strike in 1972. I don’t think the Opsroom pictured above was ever fully operational, but visualization screens were important even if at the time they were hand-drawn slides that were projected rather than computer generated visualizations (see http://varnelis.net/blog/kazys/project_cybersyn on the chairs of the Opsroom.) Beer and the Chileans wanted Cybersyn to help them implement an alternative socialist economy that was managed in real time rather than “free” and chaotic or planned in the heavy handed way of most socialist economies of the time.

Rooting around, I found a good article about Cybersyn and the English visionary designer Stafford Beer from 2003 in the Guardian by Andy Beckett, Santiago Dreaming. It turns out that Beer gave the Massey Lectures in 1971 and they have been reprinted by Anansi as Designing Freedom. He also moved part-time to Toronto in the 80s where his last partner, Dr. Allenna Leonard of Metaphorum still resides. He died in 2002.

Another interesting thread is Fernando Flores who was the political lead of Cybersyn and the person that recruited Beer for the project. After the coup, Flores went to the US and got a Ph.D. in Computer Science collaborating with Terry Winograd, and being influenced by Maturana, also Chilean. That’s right – the Flores of Understanding Computers and Cognition. He is now back in Chile as a senator and supports various projects there.

The common thread is that Beer, Flores and Maturana all seem interested in viable systems in different spheres. They were applying cybernetics.

Dreyfus: Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence

Willard in Humanist pointed us towards an interesting RAND Paper by Hubert L. Drefus from 1965, Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence which suggests that artificial intelligence research is like alchemy – initial success has led to it being oversold when the fundamental paradigm is wrong.

Alchemists were so successful in distilling quicksilver from what seemed to be diret, that after several hundred years of fruitless effort to convert lead into gold they still refused to believe that on the chemical level one cannot transmute metals. To avoid the fate of the alchemists, it is time we asked where we stand. Now, before we invest more time and money on the information-processing level, we should ask whether the protocols of human subjects suggest that comptuer language is appropriate for analyzing human behaviour. Is an exhaustive analysis of human intelligent behavior into discrete and determinate operations possible? Is an approximate analysis of human intelligent behavior in such digital terms probable? The answer to both these questions seems to be, “No.”

In this paper Dreyfus leverages the lack of progress after people like H. A. Simon in 1957 predicted the extraordinary. Dreyfus does more than make fun of the hype, he uses it to question what AI research might achieve at all and to think about intelligence.

Now that we are 50 years after Simon’s predictions things are more complicated. We do have chess playing machines that are better players than humans. (Drefus points out how the early machines being hyped were really stupid chess players.) We do have machines that can recognize complex patterns and recognize speech. We do have better machine translation. It may be going slowly, but research is moving forward. Perhaps the paradigm of the mind as a machine is wrong, but thinking about it that way and trying to model intelligent behaviour is getting results. What then do we make of the alchemical insult. Is it too easy to call magical thinking those projects that are ambitious and make the mistake of predicting success? Having recently read Siegried Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media, I’m finding myself more sympathetic of magical projects that promise to transmute data into intelligence. Impossible … probably, but that is no reason not to try.

To paraphrase the third of (recently died) Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws of prediction:

“Any sufficiently magical proposal should be indistinguishable from research.”

This obviously applies to grant proposals.

Harvard and Open Access

Peter Suber in Open Access News has reproduced the text of the motion that the Faculty of Arts and Science at Harvard passed requiring faculty to deposit a copy of their articles with the university.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles.

According to another post by Peter Suber, Harvard is the first North American university to adopt an open access policy. He calls it a “permission mandate” (granting permission to the university to make research open) rather than a “deposit mandate.” It has the virtue that the university takes responsibility for maintaining the access, not the faculty member.

More on this can be found here (another Suber post) and here (Chronicle of Higher Ed.).

Ian Hacking: analogue bodies and digital minds

The Cartesian vision fulfilled: analogue bodies and digital minds is an essay in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (2005, v. 30, n. 2) by Ian Hacking that first argues that despite the dislike for the Cartesian mind-body split in philosophy there is a degree to which Western culture is acting as if the body was analogue and the mind digital. Our metaphors, our representations, our sciences are Cartesian. Medicine treats the body as a messy mechanism, cognitive science treats the mind like a computer. Here is the abstract:

Current intellectual wisdom, abetted by philosophers of all stripes, teaches that the Cartesian philosophy is both wrong and dead. This wisdom will be overtaken by events. Present and future technologies – ranging from organ transplants to information coding – will increasingly make us revert to Descartes’s picture of two absolutely distinct types of domains, the mental and the physical, which nevertheless constantly interact. We as humans are constituted in both domains, and also must inhabit them. This is less a matter of facts – for what a person is, is never simply a matter of fact – than of how we will come to conceive of ourselves in the light of the facts that will press in upon us.

What is impressive and distracting about the essay (and what makes it accessible) is that he takes us on a tour of contemporary media culture from Japanese entertainment robots, manga, to Stelarc. It is only at the end that he makes his second move, which is to declare, without giving us a similar tour, that the representation of the mind as digital is “dated”.

Minds, on the other hand, we represent as information processors. And in this age we represent the processing of information by sequences of binary digital operations. Here I am less confident of the metaphor, which I find a bit dated. (p. 164)

He concludes by talking about Antonio Damasio’s theory which is that, “A human being is a neurologically nested triad of mind, brain and body.” (p. 165) The science that is showing the importance of the body to emotion and emotion to mind “leaves the digital mind in the dust.” (p. 165) Hardly. I find it hard to believe that science will give up on trying to formally model the mind as a method for testing hypotheses and understanding.

Barry Allen on the Tool: Artifice and Design

On Friday I heard Barry Allen talk about tools. His talk touched on points he makes in his forthcoming book, Artifice and Design: Art and Technology in Human Experience. He defined a tool as having two distinctive qualities:

  1.  Artifactual economy. A tool is an artifact and it is part of an economy of tools. Tools are made by other tools, they are controlled by other tools, and often operate on tools. This is what characterizes modern technology – a technical culture of machines driving machines making machines and interacting with machines.
  2. Functionless functionality. By this Allen, I think, meant that tools do not have a single function or purpose – that they are often used for unanticipated functions, but are still functional. The general purpose computer might be the paradigm of a tool with no fixed function that is therefore adaptable to all sorts of functions.

After the talk Barry and I talked about software as tools. He would say that a book or a movie is an artifact, but not a tool. At what point does a digital artifact go from being data to being a tool? When it is executable? Is a web page information or a tool?

Barry also made an interesting point about first-order and second-order machines. First-order machines are “devices that extend human capacities by exploiting a mechanical advantage.” Second-order machines are like factories, “an assembly of first-order machines, coupled to produce a multiplying effect. Exploits the economic equivalent of a mechanical advantage.” These second-order machines are the factories of tools that make our culture more than tool using, but an economy of technology. Allen warned that it is these second-order tools that so easily turned to waste.

Zonbu: cares about the planet too

Image of Zonbu BoxZonbu is a environmental personal computer with some interesting features. It runs a version of Linux and comes with bundled applications. You buy it with a monthly plan that gives you off-site storage and maintenance. It has no hard-drive, just a flash card for local storage. All of this means it is extremely energy efficient (consumes as much as a light bulb) and that it is easy to run. They also promise to take it back and disassemble it for recycling.As interesting as the green aspect of Zonbu is, I’m also struck by their service model. You buy it for $99 (without keyboard or monitor) and then pay $13 a month or more for the storage and support. You don’t get root access and they manage the computer for you. It comes with all the basic applications. As some commentators have put it – the Zonbu makes for a good second home computer for the family (at least those who don’t want to run PC games.)

Guy sent me this after reading my Blog Action Day grumbling.