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“In exchange for internal cleansing.”
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Rodney Brooks, the roboticist featured in Errol Morris’ great documentary Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, is interviewed by Joanne Pransky of Robotics Business Review about the future of AI. A few exchanges follow:
Joanne Pransky:
Let’s assume that your life is only 50 per cent complete. What groundbreaking challenges do you think you’ll be working on 25 and 50 years from now?
Rodney Brooks:
Twenty-five years from now: getting into and out of bed. Fifty years from now: going to the bathroom. I think robotics for eldercare and homecare are going to be important because of demographic inversion, and that’s going to be the big market for robots going forward. In one of my talks, I put up a picture of a Mercedes-Benz 2014 S-Class, and I asked the audience, “What is this?” And they say, “Oh, it’s a car. Oh, it’s a Mercedes”. And somebody said it’s an S-Class. I said, “It’s an eldercare robot”. Because what it’s going to do is let me drive much longer and safely, before my kids pry my keys from my “cold, dead hands”, so to speak. This is an example of a technology which is going to allow the elderly to have dignity and independence longer, and we baby boomers are going to be demanding those as we get older, as there aren’t going to be enough young people to serve our elderly needs.
Joanne Pransky:
If you could wave a magic wand, what technological item would you give to the world?
Rodney Brooks:
There’s two: a technological hand like a human, and object recognition like a child. We have image-based object recognition, but we don’t have the category recognition that a child can do.
Joanne Pransky:
How far away do you think we are from that vision recognition?
Rodney Brooks:
When I did my PhD on that topic in 1977, I thought we were a long way away and it’s still a long way away. We can now do vision a lot better using different techniques, but not in the same “general” way that people can do it. That may take a long time. We’ve had airplanes for over a hundred years. It’s only in the last few years that people have gotten model airplanes to land on branches. We are just understanding STOL (short takeoff and landing) now, which birds use all the time, for flying machines. That took a hundred years.
Joanne Pransky:
And what do you think the future human–robot interface (HRI) will be like? Will it be directly in the brain, as other science fiction people state? Will it be with our eyes?
Rodney Brooks:
I saw my first touch screen probably around 1988/1989 at CMU and I thought, “That’ll never work.” When I go to some of the academic human robot interaction conferences, I like to characterize some of the papers as, “Well, we tested this variation on that variation, and 60 per cent of people preferred Method A, and the other two preferred Method B.” I think that’s “want-to-be” scientist stuff. It’s asking questions at the wrong level. I think we haven’t invented it. I think a university should be inventing wild HR interactions and seeing what sticks, instead of, “Oh, well, should it be displayed this way or should I have this?” They haven’t invented this interface yet, whatever it’s going to be. That’s what people should be doing, trying different things, most of which will fail. But everyone wants the paper that just gets accepted, just enough science. I don’t know what it’s going to be, but things will change.•
Tags: Joanne Pransky, Rodney Brooks
Narrated 18-minute newsreel portrait of Iraq in 1953, as the state made a push toward modernization.
If you have stock options, why would you want to die? In Silicon Valley, researchers are endeavoring to unlock the biological secrets which in the near term would allow a person to slow down the clock considerably once middle age is reached. Further down the road, there would be an endless summer. The Palo Alto Longevity Prize has been established to encourage such work. From Josie Ensor in the Telegraph:
A person only becomes aware of their body’s homeostasis when they start losing it in middle age: often characterised by the loss of ability to tolerate cold or hot weather, or feeling nauseous after a roller-coaster ride where you once felt exhilarated.
“Up until about 45 years old, most people die from external stressors such as trauma or infection, but as we get older we die of what looks like a loss of intrinsic capacities,” he tells The Sunday Telegraph.
Increased homeostatic capacity could allow people to live beyond 120 years – the theoretical maximum human lifespan.
Scientists could effectively slow down the body’s clock and enable us to remain middle aged for 50 years or more, meaning we can feel 50 when we are really 80. The future could see us not just living longer, but staying healthier for longer.
“This isn’t like plastic surgery where you’re papering over the cracks, this is actually making a person younger from the inside out,” Dr [Joon] Yun says.
The first half of the prize will be awarded next year to the team that can restore the homeostatic capacity of an ageing adult mammal to that of a young one, thereby reversing the effects of ageing.
The second half to the team that can then extend the lifespan of their chosen mammal by 50 per cent of published norms.•
Tags: Josie Ensor
Marc Goodman, law-enforcement veteran and author of the forthcoming book Future Crimes, sat for an interview with Jason Dorrier of Singularity Hub about the next wave nefariousness, Internet-enabled and large-scale. A question about the potential for peril writ relatively small with Narrow AI and on a grand scale if we create Artificial General Intelligence. An excerpt::
Question:
Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates have expressed concern about artificial general intelligence. It’s a hotly debated topic. Might AI be our “final invention?” It seems even narrow AI in the wrong hands might be problematic.
Marc Goodman:
I would add Marc Goodman to that list. To be clear, I think AI, narrow AI, and the agents around us have tremendous opportunity to be incredibly useful. We’re using AI every day, whether it’s in our GPS devices, in our Netflix recommendations, what we see on our Facebook status updates and streams—all of that is controlled via AI.
With regard to AGI, however, I put myself firmly in the camp of concern.
Historically, whatever the tool has been, people have tried to use it for their own power. Of course, typically, that doesn’t mean that the tool itself is bad. Fire wasn’t bad. It could cook your meals and keep you warm at night. It comes down to how we use it. But AGI is different. The challenge with AGI is that once we create it, it may be out of our hands entirely, and that could certainly make it our “final invention.”
I’ll also point out that there are concerns about narrow AI too.
We’ve seen examples of criminals using narrow AI in some fascinating ways. In one case, a University of Florida student was accused of killing his college roommate for dating his girlfriend. Now, this 18-year-old freshman had a conundrum. What does he do with the dead body before him? Well, he had never murdered anybody before, and he had no idea how to dispose of the body. So, he asked Siri. The answers Siri returned? Mine, swamp, and open field, among others.
So, Siri answered his question. This 18-year-old kid unknowingly used narrow AI as an accomplice after the fact in his homicide. We’ll see many more examples of this moving forward. In the book, I say we’re leaving the world of Bonnie and Clyde and joining the world of Siri and Clyde.•
Tags: Jason Dorrier, Marc Goodman
Humans are the worst thing ever for other species, especially megafauna. When we began to appear on continents, they started to largely disappear. Some of it was unavoidable if we were going to settle all over the globe, since we needed to burn through tall grasses and forestry to explore and establish. But plenty of it could be avoided, if we begin to realize that other creatures aren’t merely meat and target practice. E.O. Wilson has suggested the “Half-Earth Cure,” but first hearts and minds will have to be won. From Peter Aldhous’ Buzzfeed article “People Are Animals, Too“:
Tommy the chimpanzee got his day in court on Oct. 8, 2014. He was unable to attend the hearing in “person” — spending the day, like any other, in a cage at a used trailer sales lot in Gloversville, New York. But an hour’s drive away, in a courtroom in the state capital of Albany, Steven Wise of the Nonhuman Rights Project argued that Tommy should indeed be considered a person under New York state law. If so, Patrick and Diane Lavery of Circle L Trailer Sales could be summoned to determine whether they are imprisoning him illegally.
Central to Wise’s arguments in Tommy’s case, and to similar suits his organization has filed on behalf of other captive chimpanzees, is the assertion that apes are highly intelligent and self-aware beings with complex emotional lives. “The uncontroverted facts demonstrate that chimpanzees possess the autonomy and self-determination that are supreme common law values,” Wise told the five judges hearing the case.
It is a bold legal move — and so far unsuccessful. The court in Albany, like a lower court before it, rejected the idea that Tommy has legal rights of personhood. But Wise intends to fight on, taking Tommy’s case to the state’s ultimate arbiter, the New York Court of Appeals.
Events elsewhere in New York state stand in stark contrast to its courts’ willingness to consider the legal implications of the science of animal cognition. In March 2014, the Rip Van Winkle Rod and Gun Club in Palenville, a hamlet of some 1,000 people on the Hudson River, held the fourth installment of an annual festival that makes a competitive sport out of shooting down creatures that — judged by objective measures of their mental abilities — are arguably just as deserving of personhood as Tommy.
Those creatures are crows, targeted with abandon at the Palenville Crow Down. In recent years, members of the corvid family — including crows, ravens, jays and magpies — have been found to possess cognitive skills once thought to be the exclusive domain of people and the great apes. They make and use tools. They remember details about the past and plan for the future. They even seem to respond to one another’s knowledge and desires. “For all the studies that have been compared directly so far, the corvids seem to perform as well as the chimpanzees,” says Nicky Clayton of the University of Cambridge, in whose lab some of the most exciting discoveries have been made.
We gaze into the eyes of a chimp and see a reflection of ourselves. We glance at a crow and see an alien being that under some jurisdictions can be exterminated with impunity — bringing a sinister second meaning to the phrase “a murder of crows.” Such biases affect ordinary people and academic experts alike, skewing our understanding of what nonhuman intelligence looks like.•
From the March 17, 1899 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
Toronto, Ont. — Four days ago David Custman, aged 21 years, began bleeding at the nose. Remedies were applied without effect, and Custman died this morning. Before death blood oozed from every pore in his body.•
Tags: David Custman
In a Hollywood Reporter piece about the former pride of the peacock, Michael Wolff states the obvious–network news organizations are of little or no consequence apart from in some odd phantom sense–but he makes the case really well. An excerpt:
Maintaining the evening news was perhaps more useful for the corporate agenda than it was as a programming tool or journalistic function. Indeed, despite its 8 million or so nightly viewers and an estimated $200 million in annual ad revenue, Nightly News long has run against the currents of news programming and become quite an organizational sore thumb — a phantom power base that commanded a strange primacy in the corporate bureaucracy. Williams, mostly irrelevant to the overall NBCUniversal bottom line or to the news itself, was yet very powerful.
Each of the networks has, over the past decade or more, made tentative efforts toward disbanding the evening news or combining it with cable operations, or, in many variations of this deal discussion, partnering with CNN. In effect, everybody recognized that the nature of newsgathering had profoundly changed and that networks could not compete (or had no interest in competing) as all-purpose news organizations. But in the end, nobody wanted to take the PR hit for killing the news, or lose the PR advantage in having it.
Until Williams, once the ultimate PR asset, became the ultimate PR nightmare.•
Tags: Brian Williams, Michael Wolff
Lick my boots, dog.
Ken’s penis is uncut.
I will never love you the way I love meth.
I just strangled a male prostitute.
My ancestors were Nazi sympathizers.
I’m Fran Lebowitz, and I’ve joined One Direction.
10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
This week, White House screening room guests got a look at fifty shades of gray.
Figuring out the final 5% of the autonomous-vehicle question will likely be more challenging than getting to that point, but there’s now a critical mass of technologists working on the remaining issues. From Hal Hodson at New Scientist:
SOME day soon, driverless podcars will cluster around our cities, waiting to pick us up on demand. There will be no steering wheel, no brake pedal; once seated, you can take a nap or watch a movie. This public facility will reduce traffic and carbon emissions. Not having to own a car will make transport cheaper for everyone.
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before.
Why are self-driving cars taking so long to show? For starters, essential technological and social changes needed to make them work might still be decades away. But they are on their way, thanks to some of the world’s largest companies. Google has been fine-tuning its autonomous cars for years, amassing hundreds of thousands of kilometres of test drives on Nevada’s roads. Last week the developers of the taxi app Uber announced a collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute to develop technology for a self-driving taxi fleet.
“It’s a very big deal,” says Nidhi Kalra, an analyst at the RAND Corporation. “Nearly every auto-maker is pursuing this technology.”
Autonomous cars will confront the same problem that faces all robots designed to operate around people: social interactions are a key part of negotiating our world.•
Tags: Hal Hodson, Nidhi Kalra
Nathaniel Rich, who made an appearance on Afflictor’s “Great 2014 Nonfiction Articles,” has written a smart piece for the New York Review of Books about pro football, the blood sport at the heart of American culture, which receives a disproportionate amount of our attention but almost always for the wrong reasons. The opening:
During the two weeks before the Super Bowl there were more than 10,000 news articles written about the slight deviation in air pressure of the footballs used by the New England Patriots in their American Football Conference Championship victory over the Indianapolis Colts. The Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, in an attempt to defuse conspiracy allegations, joked in a press conference, “Things are fine—this isn’t ISIS.”
He was right: it wasn’t ISIS. During those two weeks, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria was the subject of only seventy-nine articles in The New York Times. “Deflate-gate” was the subject of eighty. These included interviews with football players, who explained why a deflated ball was easier to throw and catch; physicists, who suggested that the deflation might have occurred due to climate effects; logisticians, who opined on the time necessary to deflate a football; and a seamstress of Wilson footballs who vowed, “It’s not Wilson’s fault.” Even the leader of the free world felt obliged to make a statement. “Here’s what I know,” said President Obama on Super Bowl Sunday. “The Patriots were going to beat the Colts regardless of what the footballs looked like.”
In that period Andy Studebaker’s name appeared in only nine articles, all published in sports blogs. Studebaker is the twenty-nine-year-old backup linebacker for the Colts who, while defending a punt return, was blindsided with a gruesome hit to the chest by the Patriots’ backup running back Brandon Bolden. Studebaker’s head jerked back and he landed on his neck. On the sideline after the play Studebaker was seen coughing up blood.
Nor was much made of the fine levied on professional monster Clay Matthews of the Green Bay Packers for illegally smashing into the defenseless head of Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson in the National Football Conference Championship game. Matthews’s fine was $22,050, or approximately what he earns every ninety seconds of game play. There was also little attention given to the fact that, in the second half of that game, Seattle cornerback Richard Sherman injured his left arm so badly that he couldn’t straighten it; he played the final quarter with it bent and pressed tightly to his chest like a chicken wing.
Was it broken? Badly sprained? Was he given shockingly powerful illegal or legal drugs in order to endure the pain? The league, and Seattle, were mum on these points. When asked ten days later about the injury, Sherman said, “It’s a little sore, but not too bad.” Then, with a wink: “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” Minutes after the Super Bowl ended it was revealed that Sherman had torn ligaments in his elbow and will have to undergo reconstructive surgery.•
Tags: Nathaniel Rich
If someone currently alive was to become a trillionaire, it’s probably as likely it would be Elon Musk as anyone. But the idea that the SpaceX founder will have established a city of 80,000 Earth immigrants on Mars within the next 25 years? I’d bet against that one. Brian Wang of the New Big Future thinks both outcomes are plausible. An excerpt:
Mars Colonial Transporter has been notionally described as being a large interplanetary spacecraft capable of taking 100 people at a time to Mars, although early flights are expected to carry fewer people and more equipment. The spacecraft has been notionally described as using a large water store to help shield occupants from space radiation and to possibly having a cabin oxygen content that is up to two times that which is found in Earth’s atmosphere.
The Mars colony envisioned by Musk would start small, notionally an initial group of fewer than ten people. With time, Musk sees that such an outpost could grow into something much larger and become self-sustaining, perhaps up to as large as 80,000 people once it is established. Musk has stated that as aspirational price goal for such a trip might be on the order of US$500,000, something that “most people in advanced countries, in their mid-forties or something like that, could put together [to make the trip].”
Before any people are transported to Mars, a number of cargo missions would be undertaken first in order to transport the requisite equipment, habitats and supplies. Equipment that would accompany the early groups would include “machines to produce fertilizer, methane and oxygen from Mars’ atmospheric nitrogen and carbon dioxide and the planet’s subsurface water ice” as well as construction materials to build transparent domes for crop growth.•
Tags: Brian Wang, Elon Musk
Vint Cerf, father of cat photos (and the rest of the Internet), is concerned that this century’s history is being preserved mainly online in bits that could go bust. While it might be less embarrassing if it all went away, it’s important for posterity that our selfies and tweets be accessible to future generations who want to understand (and mock) us. Cerf has a plan for preservation. From Pallab Ghosh at the BBC:
Vint Cerf is promoting an idea to preserve every piece of software and hardware so that it never becomes obsolete – just like what happens in a museum – but in digital form, in servers in the cloud.
If his idea works, the memories we hold so dear could be accessible for generations to come.
“The solution is to take an X-ray snapshot of the content and the application and the operating system together, with a description of the machine that it runs on, and preserve that for long periods of time. And that digital snapshot will recreate the past in the future.”
A company would have to provide the service, and I suggested to Mr Cerf that few companies have lasted for hundreds of years. So how could we guarantee that both our personal memories and all human history would be safeguarded in the long run?
Even Google might not be around in the next millennium, I said.
“Plainly not,” Vint Cerf laughed. “But I think it is amusing to imagine that it is the year 3000 and you’ve done a Google search. The X-ray snapshot we are trying to capture should be transportable from one place to another. So, I should be able to move it from the Google cloud to some other cloud, or move it into a machine I have.
“The key here is when you move those bits from one place to another, that you still know how to unpack them to correctly interpret the different parts. That is all achievable if we standardise the descriptions.
“And that’s the key issue here – how do I ensure in the distant future that the standards are still known, and I can still interpret this carefully constructed X-ray snapshot?”•
Tags: Pallab Ghosh, Vint Cerf
If you read this blog regularly, you know I adored David Carr, someone I never met except through his writing. His success was improbable, having previously survived a pitiless drug addiction–a surrender and an onslaught. Almost as unlikely was that he maintained his soulfulness inside a corporate behemoth like the New York Times, appearing unchanged, unreconstructed, unvanquished, perhaps inoculated from the plague of phoniness by the earlier taste of poison. It doesn’t surprise me that in his final column he hoped for a second chance for Brian Williams. Carr himself was one of the best second chances ever. He will be missed. From his book The Night of the Gun, in which he searched for a face that was strange yet his own:
Am I a lunatic? Yes. When am I going to cut this stuff out? Apparently never. Does God see me right now? Yes. God sees everything, including the blind.
Trapped in drug-induced paranoia, I began to think of the police as God’s emissaries, arriving not to seek vengeance but a cease-fire, a truce that would put me up against a wall of well-deserved consequences, and the noncombatants, the children, out of harm’s way.
On this night — it was near the end — every hit sent out an alarm along my vibrating synapses. If the cops were coming — Any. Minute. Now. — I should be sitting out in front of the house. That way I could tell them that yes, there were drugs and paraphernalia in the house, but no guns. And there were four blameless children. They could put the bracelets on me, and, head bowed, I would solemnly lead them to the drugs, to the needles, to the pipes, to what was left of the money. And then some sweet-faced matrons would magically appear and scoop up those babies and take them to that safe, happy place. I had it all planned out.
I took another hit, and Barley and I walked out and sat on the steps. My eyes, my heart, the veins in my forehead, pulsed against the stillness of the night. And then they came. Six unmarked cars riding in formation with lights off, no cherries, just like I pictured. It’s on.
A mix of uniforms and plainclothes got out, and in the weak light of the street, I could see long guns held at 45-degree angles. I was oddly proud that I was on the steps, that I now stood between my children and the dark fruits of the life I had chosen. I had made the right move after endless wrong ones. And then they turned and went to the house across the street.
Much yelling. “Facedown! Hug the carpet! No sudden movements!” A guy dropped out of the second-floor window in just gym shorts, but they were waiting. More yelling and then quiet. I went back inside the house and watched the rest of it play out through the corner of the blind. Their work done, the cops loaded several cuffed people into a van. I let go of the blind and got back down to business. It wasn’t my turn.
Twenty years later, now sober and back for a look at my past, I sat outside that house on Oliver Avenue on a hot summer day in a rental car, staring long and hard to make sense of what had and had not happened there. The neighborhood had turned over from white to black, but it was pretty much the same. Nice lawns, lots of kids, no evidence of the mayhem that had gone on inside. Sitting there in a suit with a nice job in a city far away and those twins on their way to college, I almost would have thought I’d made it up. But I don’t think I did. While I sat there giving my past the once over, someone lifted up the corner of the blind in the living-room window. It was time to go.•
Tags: David Carr
“$1 million each.”
Looking to sell the following un-produced screenplays ($1 million each).
Please let me know if you are interested.
THE PINK SHOW (SOUQUITOUR) – SARA GANES is a stand up comic about to get her shot at her own talk show if she can survive her mother’s loving attacks for 3 more days. Her mother is a vicious past life rival who has destroyed her, life after life. 93 pages. WGAw_1112025
BLOND BOY AND THE PSYCHICS – Psychics convince FBI’s Gaucho Kruger that a child they call “blond boy” will kill many important people. Their tips drag Gaucho through ridicule but he finally captures the mother, a disenchanted former CIA operative. 94 pages. WGAw_1129814
THE PROSTITUTES — All goes awry for former child prostitutes bent on freeing as many brothel children as possible with blackmail proceeds when a radical youth convinces their leader to go after the army. When the dirt settles, most are dead but they prevail. 90 pages. WGAw_1129815
GOLDEN EGG GOOSE (ATLANTIDE) – Refugees from planet Atlantide fight to find a baby lost 18 years ago. She is now a lonely woman struggling with her ability to make wishes come true. 102 pages. WGAw_1129816 (keyword: extraterestrial)
THE BELOVED (THE SHEIK) – Former CIA operative UMBERTO POTTI abandoned his wife precisely to protect her from his work only to have her become a target when he kidnaps the Sheik of a Parisian mosque. 99 pages. WGA #1030163
(Copyrighted material. Worldwide rights reserved.)
“Gaucho Kruger.”
Trying to predict weather with precision is a fool’s errand, and even overall trends are tricky. In a new study published at Science Advances, scholars forecast decades-long drought for the American Southwest, beginning later this century. If it were to occur, the stress on humans, infrastructure and finances would be extreme. This, not Al-Qaeda, is a huge threat to us. From Suzanne Goldenberg at the Guardian:
The years since 2000 give only a small indication of the punishment ahead. In parts of Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, 11 of those years have been drought years.
As many as 64 million people were affected by those droughts, according to Nasa projections.
Those conditions have produced lasting consequences. In California, now undergoing its fourth year of drought – and the worst dry spell in 1,200 years, farmers have sold off herds. Growers have abandoned fields. Cities have imposed water rationing.
But future droughts could be even more disruptive, because they will likely drag on for decades, not years.
“We haven’t seen this kind of prolonged drought even certainly in modern US history,” Smerdon said. “What this study has shown is the likelihood that multi-decadal events comprising year after year after year of extreme dry events could be something in our future.”•
Tags: Suzanne Goldenberg
Donald Trump, a human oil spill, apparently requested that the Obama Administration make him czar of the BP cleanup effort, according to David Axelrod’s new book. From Amy Chozick in the New York Times:
Question:
Some anecdotes in the book make clear that, as a senior adviser to the president, you dealt with some odd requests. Donald Trump asked you to put him in charge of cleaning up the BP oil spill.
David Axelrod:
You owe it to the president to be polite and to give folks a hearing. But even as I was going through these conversations, I had this sense of surreality. I was watching the scene and thinking, Man, this is really bizarre. I gotta write about this someday. Nobody will believe this.•
Tags: Amy Chozick, Barack Obama, David Axelrod, Donald Trump
Unintended consequences aren’t necessarily a bad thing. The new batteries manufactured for EVs are beginning to be repurposed to power homes. If a good deal of that electricity can be created from solar, a major correction to environmental damage could be in the offing. From Ben Popper at the Verge:
Tesla didn’t ship nearly as many cars this quarter as it had projected, but CEO Elon Musk remained upbeat during today’s earnings call as he let some details slip about a brand new product. According to Musk, the company is working on a consumer battery pack for the home. Design of the battery is apparently complete, and production could begin in six months. Tesla is still deciding on a date for unveiling the new unit, but Musk said he was pleased with the result, calling the pack “really great” and voicing his excitement for the project.
What would a Tesla home battery look like? The Toyota Mirai, which uses a hydrogen fuel cell, gives owners the option to remove the battery and use it to supply electrical power to their homes. That battery can reportedly power the average home for a week when fully charged. Employees at many big Silicon Valley tech companies already enjoy free charging stations at their office parking lot. Now imagine if they could use that juice to eliminate their home electric bill.•
Tags: Ben Popper, Elon Musk
As Reality TV is the modern freak show, the anomalies now hurt psyches rather than hunched backs, the Twitter evisceration of the lunkheaded is the contemporary auto-de-fé, the collective sacrifice of a few to atone for all of our sins. It’s not that the racist and sexist and generally offensive tweets are being sent out by angels who deserve employment security despite their public stupidity, but the crowd condemnation that is supposedly righteousness may actually reveal some wrongheadedness, our process of socialization perhaps tainted by antisocial impulse. How else to explain the death threats that continue long after a career has been ruined? From “How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life,” Jon Ronson’s New York Times Magazine article of one such lunkhead and the culture of condemnation:
In the early days of Twitter, I was a keen shamer. When newspaper columnists made racist or homophobic statements, I joined the pile-on. Sometimes I led it. The journalist A. A. Gill once wrote a column about shooting a baboon on safari in Tanzania: “I’m told they can be tricky to shoot. They run up trees, hang on for grim life. They die hard, baboons. But not this one. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out.” Gill did the deed because he “wanted to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger.”
I was among the first people to alert social media. (This was because Gill always gave my television documentaries bad reviews, so I tended to keep a vigilant eye on things he could be got for.) Within minutes, it was everywhere. Amid the hundreds of congratulatory messages I received, one stuck out: “Were you a bully at school?”
Still, in those early days, the collective fury felt righteous, powerful and effective. It felt as if hierarchies were being dismantled, as if justice were being democratized. As time passed, though, I watched these shame campaigns multiply, to the point that they targeted not just powerful institutions and public figures but really anyone perceived to have done something offensive. I also began to marvel at the disconnect between the severity of the crime and the gleeful savagery of the punishment. It almost felt as if shamings were now happening for their own sake, as if they were following a script.
Eventually I started to wonder about the recipients of our shamings, the real humans who were the virtual targets of these campaigns. So for the past two years, I’ve been interviewing individuals like Justine Sacco: everyday people pilloried brutally, most often for posting some poorly considered joke on social media. Whenever possible, I have met them in person, to truly grasp the emotional toll at the other end of our screens. The people I met were mostly unemployed, fired for their transgressions, and they seemed broken somehow — deeply confused and traumatized.•
Tags: A. A. Gill, Jon Ronson, Justine Sacco
The nuclear family seems a fleeting arrangement, one that a society eventually advances beyond, remaking the idea with more complex entanglements, like a welter of telephone wires that cross and recross one another yet work just fine. Iran’s young are rejecting early marriage (and sometimes all marriage), and the conservative government is reacting with the expected ham-fisted response. From an Economist report:
AT A loss to explain why most youngsters are delaying marriage or altogether shunning the idea of a happy union, Iran’s government is taking action. In Hamedan province, a senior ayatollah recently warned unmarried public workers to find a spouse within a year or risk losing their jobs. A gentler approach, announced in January, is the launch of a matchmaker website which, the government hopes, could lead to as many as 100,000 marriages.
For those who fret about such things, there is much to stoke concern. The traditional family unit is falling apart in Iran, as elsewhere: around one in three marriages in the capital, Tehran, fails.
The Shia form of Islam practiced in Iran allows sigheh, or temporary marriage that can last for as little as an hour. The government would prefer more durable pairings, however.
In any case, under-30s, who make up 55% of Iran’s population of 77m, seem far more interested in brief flings than marriage. Hence some 300 “immoral” Western-style dating websites have sprung up of late. Unable to close them all down, the state’s moral guardians have decided to turn matchmaker instead.
But its website, which launches later this month, is unlikely to make much impression beyond religious neighbourhoods where, in any case, there is little premarital nookie. “I would never put my name on a government-run site… no matter how desperate I felt,” says Farhad, a 32-year-old who has been single for the past three years.•
A hammer can be a tool or a weapon depending on how you swing it, and that’s important to remember while we’re being wowed by Boston Dynamics’ new four-legged robot, Spot. Neel V. Patel of Wired noticed something about the viral video showcasing the AI: a moment which is perhaps coincidence or maybe collective behavior, even if it isn’t swarm robotics. An excerpt:
We’ve seen all of this—admittedly amazing—stuff out of BD’s four-legged robots before. But it gets crazier around the 1:20 mark, when a pair of Spots begin trekking up a hill. Spot Number One starts repeatedly colliding into Spot Number Two—and neither loses balance. After a few seconds and a bit of subtle push-and-shove, they straighten out and walk in parallel again, and then turn together once they reach the top of the hill. This is getting creepy, guys—it looks like these robots are exhibiting the same swarm-like behavior that we see in animals.
We checked in with Iain Couzin, a Princeton biologist and expert in the study of collective animal behavior, to get his take on the robots’ seeming hive mind.
We know from Spot’s reaction to that kick that he can dynamically correct his stability—behavior that’s modeled after biological systems. From what Couzin can tell, the robots’ collective movement is an organic outgrowth of that self-correction. When the two Spots collide at the 1:25 mark, they’re both able to recover quickly from the nudge and continue on their route up the hill. “But the collision does result in them tending to align with one another (since each pushes against the other),” Couzin wrote in an email. “That can be an important factor: Simple collisions among individuals can result in collective motion.”
In Couzin’s research on locusts, for example, the insects form plagues that move together by just barely avoiding collisions. “Recently, avoidance has also been shown to allow the humble fruit fly to make effective collective decisions,” he wrote.
It doesn’t look like Spot is programmed to work with his twin brothers and sisters—but that doesn’t matter if their coordination emerges naturally from the physical rules that govern each individual robot. Clearly, bumping into each other isn’t the safest or most efficient way to get your robot army to march in lock step, but it’s a good start.•
Tags: Iain Couzin, Neel V. Patel
Excerpts follow from a pair of 1990s interviews with Artificial Intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky. I wonder how much he’s changed his mind one way or another about AI as he enters his 88th year.
_____________________________
From Claudia Dreifus’ 1998 NYT article:
Question:
How do you define common sense?
Marvin Minsky:
Common sense is knowing maybe 30 or 50 million things about the world and having them represented so that when something happens, you can make analogies with others. If you have common sense, you don’t classify the things literally; you store them by what they are useful for or what they remind us of. For instance, I can see that suitcase (over there in a corner) as something to stand on to change a light bulb as opposed to something to carry things in.
Question:
Could you get machines to the point where they can deal with the intangibles of humanness?
Marvin Minsky:
It’s very tangible, what I’m talking about. For example, you can push something with a stick, but you can’t pull it. You can pull something with a string, but you can’t push it. That’s common sense. And no computer knows it. Right now, I’m writing a book, a sequel to The Society of Mind, and I am looking at some of this. What is pain? What is common sense? What is falling in love?
Question:
What is love?
Marvin Minsky:
Well, what are emotions? Emotions are big switches, and there are hundreds of these. . . . If you look at a book about the brain, the brain just looks like switches. . . . You can think of the brain as a big supermarket of goodies that you can use for different purposes. Falling in love is turning on some 20 or 30 or these and turning a lot of the others off. It’s some particular arrangement. To understand it, one has to get some theory of what are the resources in the brain, what kind of arrangements are compatible and what happens when you turn several on and they get into conflict. Being angry is another collection of switches. In this book, I’m trying to give examples of how these things work.
Question:
In the 1968 Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey, a computer named Hal developed a lethal jealousy of his space companion, a human astronaut. How far are we away from a jealous machine?
Marvin Minsky:
We could be five minutes from it, but it would be so stupid that we couldn’t tell. Though Hal is fiction, why shouldn’t he be jealous? There’s an argument between my friend John McCarthy and me because he thinks you could make smart machines that don’t have any humanlike emotions. But I think you’re going to have to go to great lengths to prevent them from having some acquisitiveness and the need to control things. Because to solve a problem, you have to have the resources and if there are limited resources . . .
Question:
Where were Stanley Kubrick and his co-author, Arthur C. Clarke, right with their 2001: Space Odyssey predictions?
Marvin Minsky:
On just about everything except for the date. It’s quite a remarkable piece.
Question:
Do you believe the National Aeronautics and Space Administration wastes money by insisting on humans for space exploration?
Marvin Minsky:
It’s not that they waste money. It’s that they waste ALL the money.
Question:
If you were heading NASA, how would you run it?
Marvin Minsky:
I would have a space station, but it would be unmanned. And we would throw some robots up there that are not intelligent, but just controlled through teleoperators and you could sort of feel what’s doing. Then, we could build telescopes and all sorts of things and perhaps explore the moon and Mars by remote control. Nobody’s thought of much use for space. The clearest use is building enormous telescopes to see the rest of the universe.•
_____________________________
From Otto Laske’s 1991 AAAI Press interview:
Otto Laske:
I hear you are writing a science fiction novel. Is that your first such work?
Marvin Minsky:
Well, yes, it is, and it is something I would not have tried to do alone. It is a spy-adventure techno-thriller that I am writing together with my co-author Harry Harrison. Harry did most of the plotting and invention of characters, while I invented new brain science and AI technology for the next century.
Otto Laske:
At what point in time is the novel situated?
Marvin Minsky:
It’s set in the year 2023.
Otto Laske:
I may just be alive to experience it, then …
Marvin Minsky:
Certainly. And furthermore, if the ideas of the story come true, then anyone who manages to live until then may have the opportunity to live forevermore…
Otto Laske:
How wonderful …
Marvin Minsky:
… because the book is about ways to read out the contents of a person’s brain, and then download those contents into more reliable hardware, free from decay and disease. If you have enough money…
Otto Laske:
That’s a very American footnote …
Marvin Minsky:
Well, it’s also a very Darwinian concept.
Otto Laske:
Yes, of course.
Marvin Minsky:
There isn’t room for every possible being in this finite universe, so, we have to be selective …
Otto Laske:
And who selects, or what is the selective mechanism?
Marvin Minsky:
Well, normally one selects by fighting. Perhaps somebody will invent a better way. Otherwise, you have to have a committee …
Otto Laske:
That’s worse than fighting, I think.•
Tags: Claudia Dreifus, Marvin Minsky, Otto Laske
I think human beings will eventually go extinct without superintelligence to help us ward off big-impact challenges, yet I understand that Strong AI brings its own perils. I just don’t feel incredibly worried about it at the present time, though I think it’s a good idea to start focusing on the challenge today rather than tomorrow. In his Medium essay “Russell, Bostrom and the Risk of AI,” Lyle Cantor wonders whether humans are to computers as chimps are to humans. An excerpt:
Consider the chimp. If we are grading on a curve, chimps are very, very intelligent. Compare them to any other species besides Homo sapiens and they’re the best of the bunch. They have the rudiments of language, use very simple tools and have complex social hierarchies, and yet chimps are not doing very well. Their population is dwindling, and to the extent they are thriving they are thriving under our sufferance not their own strength.
Why? Because human civilization is little like the paperclip maximizer; We don’t hate chimps or the other animals whose habitats we are rearranging; we just see higher value arrangements of the earth and water they need to survive. And we are only every-so-slighter smarter than chimps.
In many respects our brains are nearly identical. Yes, the average human brain is about three times the size of an average chimp’s, but we still share much of the same gross structure. And our neurons fire at about 100 times per second and communicate through salutatory conduction, just like theirs do.
Compare that with the potential limits of computing. …
In terms of intellectual capacity, there’s an awful lot of room above us. An AI could potentially think millions of times faster than us. Problems that take the smartest humans years to solve it could solve in mintues. If a paperclip maximizer (or value-of-Goldman Sachs-stock maximzer or USA hegemony maximzer or refined-gold maximizer) is created, why should we expect our fate then to be any different that that of chimps now?•
Tags: Lyle Cantor, Nick Bostrom, Stewart Russell
