History – Page 2 – Theoreti.ca

How Canada Accidentally Helped Crack Computer Translation

A technological whodunit—featuring Parliament, computer scientists, and a tipsy plane flight

Arun sent me a link to a neat story about How Canada Accidentally Helped Crack Computer Translation. The story is by Christine Mitchell and is in the Walrus (June 2023). It describes how IBM got ahold of a magnetic reel tape with 14 years of the Hansard – the translated transcripts of the Canadian Parliament. IBM went on to use this data trove to make advances in automatic translation.

The story mentions the politics of automated translation research in Canada. I have previously blogged about the Booths who were recruited by the NRC to Saskatchewan to work on automated translation. They were apparently pursuing a statistical approach like that IBM took later on, but their funding was cut.

Speaking of automatic translation, Canada had a computerized system, METEO for translating daily weather forecasts from Environment Canada. This ran from 1981 to 2001 and was an early successful implementation of automatic translation in the real world. It came out of work at the TAUM (Traduction Automatique à l’Université de Montréal) research group at the Université de Montréal that was set up in the late 1960s.

The case for taking AI seriously as a threat to humanity

From the Open Philanthropy site I came across this older (2020) Vox article, The case for taking AI seriously as a threat to humanity by Kelsey Piper. The article nicely summarizes some of the history of concerns around AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) as people tend to call an AI so advanced it might be comparable to human intelligence. This history goes back to Turing’s colleague I.J. Good who speculated in 1965 that,

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.

Such an explosion has been called the Singularity by Vernor Vinge and was popularized by Ray Kurzweil.

I came across this following threads on the whole issue of whether AI would soon become an existential threat. The question of the dangers of AI (whether AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) or just narrow AI) has gotten a lot of attention especially since Geoffrey Hinton ended his relationship with Google so he could speak about it. He and other signed a short statement published on the site of the Center for AI Safety,

Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

The existential question only become relevant if one believes, as many do, that there is considerable risk that AI research and development is moving so fast that it may soon achieve some level of generality at which point such an AGI could begin act in unpredictable and dangerous ways. Alternatively people could misuse such powerful AGIs to harm us. Open Philanthropy is one group that is focused on Potential Risks form Advanced AI. They could be classed as an organization with a longtermism view, a view that it is important to ethics (and philanthropy) to consider long-term issues.

Advances in AI could lead to extremely positive developments, but could also potentially pose risks from intentional misuse or catastrophic accidents.

Others have called for a Manhattan Project for AI Safety. There are, of course, those (including me) that feel that this is distracting from the immediate unintended effects of AI and/or that there is little existential danger for the moment as AGI is decades off. The cynic in my also wonders how much the distraction is intentional as it both hypes the technology (its dangerous therefore it must be important) or justifies ignoring the stubborn immediate problems like racist bias in the training data.

Kelsey Piper has in the meantime published A Field Guide to AI Safety.

The question still remains whether AI is dangerous enough to merit the sort of ethical attention that nuclear power, for example, has recieved.

Lisa: Steve Jobs’ sabotage and Apple’s secret burial

Who remembers the Lisa? The Verge has a nice short documentary on the Lisa: Steve Jobs’ sabotage and Apple’s secret burial. The Lisa, named after Jobs’ daughter and released in 1983, was the first Apple with a graphical user interface. Alas it was too expensive (almost $10K USD at the time) and was eventually superseded by the Macintosh that came out in 1994 despite being technically superior.

The documentary is less about the Lisa than the end of the Lisa including an interview with Bob Cook who sold remaindered and used Lisa’s after they were discontinued thanks to a deal with Apple until Apple decided to bury them all in a landfill in Utah. (Which reminds me of the Atari video game cartridge burial of 1983.) The documentary is also, as every Apple story is, about Steve Jobs and his return to Apple in the late 1990s which led to its turnaround into the successful company it is now. Was it Jobs who wanted to bury the Lisa?

Destroy All Monsters

There has recently been some fuss around the change in the Open Gaming License of Dungeons & Dragons. So here is a nice story about D&D and its history, Destroy All Monsters.

D&D is a game for people who like rules: in order to play even the basic game, you had to make sense of roughly twenty pages of instructions, which cover everything from “Adjusting Ability Scores” (“Magic-users and clerics can reduce their strength scores by 3 points and add 1 to their prime requisite”) to “Who Gets the First Blow?” (“The character with the highest dexterity strikes first”). In fact, as I wandered farther into the cave, and acquired the rulebooks for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, I found that there were rules for everything: … It would be a mistake to think of these rules as an impediment to enjoying the game. Rather, the rules are a necessary condition for enjoying the game, and this is true whether you play by them or not. The rules induct you into the world of D&D; they are the long, difficult scramble from the mouth of the cave to the first point where you can stand up and look around.

Germany lifts ban on Nazi symbols in computer games | CNN

Computer and video games featuring Nazi symbols such as the swastika can now be sold in Germany uncensored after a regulatory body lifted the longstanding ban.

CNN reported back in 2018 that Germany lifts ban on Nazi symbols in computer games. The game that prompted this was the counterfactual Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus that imagines the Nazis won WW II. To sell the game in Germany they had to change the symbols like the swastika as it is forbidden to display such symbols of “unconstitutional organizations.” Anyway, Germany has changed its interpretation of the law so that games are now treated as works of art like movies where it is legal to show the symbols.

This shows how difficult it can be to ban hate speech while not censoring the arts. For that matter, how does one deal with ironic hate speech – hate speech masquerading as irony?

Ken Kesey and the Rush to Deinstitutionalization

Jack Nicholson and director Milos Foreman on set of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Whatever the literary strengths of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the book has done much to harm both the mentally ill and their communities.

This May the Kule Institute is organizing a hybrid exhibit/symposium on the Institution of Knowledge. We are bringing together a group of artists and thinkers to raise and address questions about institutional structures and knowledge. One question that the small group I’m part of discussed this week as the question of deinstitutionalization and the view, best captured by Ken Kesey in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that asylums as institutions were sites that did more harm than good. Stephen Eide has a nice article about this, Ken Kesey and the Rush to Deinstitutionalization (Quilette, Nov. 14, 2022).

There are a number of aspects to the issue. The first thing to note is that the deinstitutionalization of people with serious mental health issues didn’t work as imagined. It was not the freeing of an oppressed constituency back to the community where the new drugs could help them integrate and get on with their lives. There wasn’t really a community that wanted them other than the street and many ended up in the very institutions asylums were meant to replace – prisons. Stephen Eide’s book Homelessness in America traces the effects of deinstitutionalization, changes in vagrancy laws, and the “cleaning” up of slums on homelessness leading to the problem as we see it today.

But what about the idea of deinstitutionalization? Important to this idea would be Foucault, changes in psychiatry and how the discipline conceives of the role of medicine (and its institutions), and changes in public policy and what jurisdictions try to do with institutions.

One aspect of the issues that we forget if we think of institutions as bureaucracy is the built presence of institutions. From Jefferson’s design of the campus of the University of Virginia to Olmstead’s asylum landscapes, architects have shaped our imagination and the literal structures of certain types of institutions. This raises the question of what new types of institutions might be in being designed?

The Royal Game of Ur: Play the Oldest Board Game on Record – The New York Times

For 4,600 years, a mysterious game slept in the dust of southern Iraq, largely forgotten. The passion of a museum curator and the hunger of young Iraqis for their cultural history may bring it back.

The New York Times has a story on The Royal Game of Ur: Play the Oldest Board Game on Record. A curator at the British Museum, Irving Finkel, connected the translation of a tablet with the rules with an ancient board game of which there were copies in museums (see picture above). More recently the game has been reintroduced into Iraq so that people can rediscover their ludic heritage.

The nice thing about the NYTimes article, beside the video of Finkel who has an amazing beard, is that they include a PDF that you can download and print to learn to play the game.

The article and Finkel’s video talk highlight how influential a game can be – how a set of rules can be a meme that helps rediscover a game.

From Bitcoin to Stablecoin: Crypto’s history is a house of cards

The wild beginnings, crazy turns, colorful characters and multiple comebacks of the crypto world

The Washington Post has a nice illustrated history of crypto, From Bitcoin to Stablecoin: Crypto’s history is a house of cards. They use a deck of cards as a visual metaphor and a graph of the ups and downs of crypto. I can’t help thinking that crypto is going to go up again, but when and in what form?

For that matter, where is Ruja Ignatova?

They Did Their Own ‘Research.’ Now What? – The New York Times

In spheres as disparate as medicine and cryptocurrencies, “do your own research,” or DYOR, can quickly shift from rallying cry to scold.

The New York Times has a nice essay by John Herrman on They Did Their Own ‘Research.’ Now What? The essay talks about the loss of trust in authorities and the uses/misuses of DYOR (Do Your Own Research) gestures especially in discussions about cryptocurrencies. DYOR seems to act rhetorically as:

Advice that readers should do research before making a decision and not trust authorities (doctors, financial advisors etc).
A disclaimer that readers should not blame the author if things don’t turn out right.
A scold to or for those who are not committed to whatever it is that is being pushed as based on research. It is a form of research signalling – “I’ve done my research, if you don’t believe me do yours.”
A call to join a community of instant researchers who are skeptical of authority. If you DYOR then you can join us.
A call to process (of doing your own research) over truth. Enjoy the research process!
Become an independent thinker who is not in thrall to authorities.

The article talks about a previous essay about the dangers of doing one’s own research. One can become unreasonably convinced one has found a truth in a “beginner’s bubble”.

DYOR is an attitude, if not quite a practice, that has been adopted by some athletes, musicians, pundits and even politicians to build a sort of outsider credibility. “Do your own research” is an idea central to Joe Rogan’s interview podcast, the most listened to program on Spotify, where external claims of expertise are synonymous with admissions of malice. In its current usage, DYOR is often an appeal to join in, rendered in the language of opting out.

The question is whether reading around is really doing research or whether it is selective listening. What does it mean to DYOR in the area of vaccines? It seems to mean not trusting science and instead listening to all sorts of sympathetic voices.

What does this mean about the research we do in the humanities. Don’t we sometimes focus too much on discourse and not give due weight to the actual science or authority of those we are “questioning”? Haven’t we modelled this critical stance where what matters is that one overturns hierarchy/authority and democratizes the negotiation of truth? Irony, of course, trumps all.

Alas, to many the humanities seem to be another artful conspiracy theory like all the others. DYOR!

The Internet is Made of Demons

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is is not what you think it is.

Sam Kriss has written a longish review essay on Justin E.H. Smith’s The Internet is Not What You Think It Is with the title The Internet is Made of Demons. In the first part Kriss writes about how the internet is possessing us and training us,

Everything you say online is subject to an instant system of rewards. Every platform comes with metrics; you can precisely quantify how well-received your thoughts are by how many likes or shares or retweets they receive. For almost everyone, the game is difficult to resist: they end up trying to say the things that the machine will like. For all the panic over online censorship, this stuff is far more destructive. You have no free speech—not because someone might ban your account, but because there’s a vast incentive structure in place that constantly channels your speech in certain directions. And unlike overt censorship, it’s not a policy that could ever be changed, but a pure function of the connectivity of the internet itself. This might be why so much writing that comes out of the internet is so unbearably dull, cycling between outrage and mockery, begging for clicks, speaking the machine back into its own bowels.

Then Kriss makes the case that the Internet is made of demons – not in a paranoid conspiracy sort of way, but in a historical sense that ideas like the internet often involve demons,

Trithemius invented the internet in a flight of mystical fancy to cover up what he was really doing, which was inventing the internet. Demons disguise themselves as technology, technology disguises itself as demons; both end up being one and the same thing.

In the last section Kriss turns to Justin E.H. Smith’s book and reflects on how the book (unlike the preceding essay “It’s All Over”) are not what the internet expects. The internet, for Smith, likes critical essays that present the internet as a “rupture” – something like the industrial revolution, but for language – while in fact the internet in some form (like demons) has been with us all along. Kriss doesn’t agree. For him the idea of the internet might be old, but what we have now is still a transformation of an old nightmare.

If there are intimations of the internet running throughout history, it might be because it’s a nightmare that has haunted all societies. People have always been aware of the internet: once, it was the loneliness lurking around the edge of the camp, the terrible possibility of a system of signs that doesn’t link people together, but wrenches them apart instead. In the end, what I can’t get away from are the demons. Whenever people imagined the internet, demons were always there.