“epiphanies”

Rented a bike the other day and rode around San Francisco for the first time. I was as happy as can be. Very physical, dog-like, movement-for-the-sake-of-movement fun. Fell in love with this beautiful city all over again, the place makes much more sense on a bike, distances feel right: pretty much everything is just a couple of minutes away.

But, you know me, as soon as I jumped on the bike I started thinking of ways to make it better. My main beef is in the context of sidewalks: bikes take too much space and are too hard to control at very slow, almost stop, speeds. Also, riding hills is too hard.

So, here a proposal to address these concerns. A bike for the city, for sidewalks, for standing:

What d’you think?

Updates 10/June/2008:

I studied math in college because I didn’t believe it. Never could understand how or why someone would come up with the stuff we were being teached. Thanks to some innate verbal ability and motherly discipline, I was thankfully “good” at it though, good enough to realize that what we were “learning” was nothing but mindless regurgitation.

Just that, an emotion. Often sudden, arbitrary, and against our (as opposed to our gene’s) best interest. Not a revelation nor the distillation of reason nor its conclusion—whence this fancy that reason leads somewhere? “Gut feeling” is, you guessed it, nothing but a feeling. Just as we have unique emotions about concrete things—say, lust—, we have unique emotions about abstract ideas and statements—say, certainty. Emotions, concrete or abstract, are enzymes, catalysts: they shortcircuit dillydallying, they trigger action. Ruminating all day without acting makes as little evolutionary sense as ogling all day without fucking. Hence lust, hence certainty.

That, in a nutshell, is On Being Certain’s premise, and though I have but skimmed it in one of my epic B & N skimming marathons, I was certain of its truth the moment I read it.

This was a couple of weeks ago but I had to write about it because I was so happy through it: Steve Omohundro’ s wonderful talk, AI and Transhuman Morality, organized by the Sillicon Valley transhumanist meetup. I brought Mauro with me and I was very nervous because I didn’t know what to expect. A couple of days ago I had gone to an AI meetup in the same room (in the wonderful TechShop) and it had been confusing and somewhat disappointing: we watched an overly long video, had some haphazard if interesting discussion, and it all ended up abruptly without me being able to make up my mind of the strange event (where these people quacks? mad geniuses? autists? were all meetings this awkward?).

Anyway, we went and I’m happy we did because I enjoyed Steve’s wonderful two-hour presentation so much I was smiling like an idiot the whole time (at one point, I even clutched Mauro to tell him simply, “I am happy”—and it was true). As I said, it was more than two hours long but I honestly didn’t want the presentation to end, particularly when so many of the interventions where, wonder of wonders, relevant and interesting of themselves.

The presentation was divided in 2 halves. The 1st for reviewing what we know of human morality, the 2nd for contemplating what AI morality will be like. Both were fascinating and chock full of surprising, cutting-edge ideas (and book recommendations!), but it was the 2nd where I was truly overjoyed, for, you see, it was when Steve plunged into how an AI’s morality might be structured.

I was struck by how the utility function ethics he considered for AIs were exactly the kind of ethics I had chanced on one day, not long ago, when in my desire to clarify how and for what I wanted to live, I thought, wrote, and rewrote about ethics with the most honesty and rigor I could muster. Heck, we even used the same examples! You have no idea how good it felt to finally find a fellow freak who  not only understood and care about my conclusions but who had arrived to them through entirely different paths (conclusions like how ethics hinge entirely on purposes or goals and how we’re in for an ethical ride when these become much more varied and malleable than they’ve ever been before). Back in Guadalajara I talked about this all the time but no one ever really got it (or much cared).

Ah, this kind of stuff was why I came to the bay area! (Mauro liked it a lot too, saying afterwards he had felt as one should feel after going to mass—full of awe and excitement.)

Starting an artificial language has been a recurrent dream of mine. As a subscriber to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that the shape of our language is the shape of our thought), a believer in ending Babel through an auxlang, a pathological formist, and an admirer of the grace, elegance, and pleasure to be found in conlangs such as Esperanto and toki pona, I believe the enterprise worth a lifetime, worth my lifetime.

But of course, given my extremist bent, I want to start an artificial language that subsumes all languages. A language to make languages, like in John Varley’s beautiful Persistence of Vision. An extensible language to gobble up and be enriched by the thoughts and feelings of as many souls as the universe will ever have. A perfectly regular language that can be learned in a week but never mastered. The creation of a self-conscious, language-obsessed culture but learnable by the illiterate. A language so abstract and basic, it can be embodied inside any symbolic system, be it based on sounds, graphics, gestures, raised dots, or farts; be it English, Maori, or Farsi. A language of infinite expressibility, synthetic and analytic, vague and precise, formal and casual, exquisite and coarse. A language that will outlast the stars.

The key, I think, lies in internal flexibility. The ideal is to do for language what the Hindu-Arabic numeral system did for numbers. Not only will there be no arbitrary, capricious limits to word creation, it will be a language of pure word creation, able to convey books in a word, lifetimes in a sentence. It will be a language complete in itself yet always growing.

After years of frenzying about it late at night, the language finally got its first name, despite it not yet having a transliteration, let alone any words. It’s self-referentially called, among infinite names, the-language-this-word-belongs-to.

Transhumanist transgender Martine Rothblatt proposes the most original solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I’ve ever conceived: Two Stars for Peace—the incorporation of Palestine and Israel into the U.S. as the 51st and 52nd states. She has wrote a book making the detailed case and has spoken about it on Sirius satellite radio:

This is so far out our ordinary could I’m still shocked. My rather unusual Mexican high school put an odd emphasis on the Middle East and this is by far the best idea I know of. Just imagine, fighting war with peace. Hope. Freedom.

A fairly unique thing about democracy and capitalism is that —as opposed to, say, monarchy or theocracy— both are formal systems for collective decision making, both specify clear rules for obtaining and aggregating the ends of differing individuals.

As such systems, they both necessarily hinge in what we shall refer to as ballots. Usually the paper in which votes are cast, we will here use the word ‘ballot’ to mean ”an external expression of preference.” The key part is ‘external’. Externality has problems all its own but is also our only hope of finding out what others think—telepathy, guessing, and revelation are our other options.

In democracy, votes are the ballots. In capitalism, it’s money. In democracy, a clinic will be built if the majority of voters vote in its favor. It will keep in operation as long as people don’t vote it out of existence. In capitalism, a clinic will be built if enough people pool the money for its construction and it will keep in operation as long as it makes a profit—that is, as long as it ends up receiving more money than it gives away.

Seeing votes and money as instances of the same concept begs an intriguing question: How then do they differ? How is a vote different than a buck? What specific changes do you need to make to a vote ballot to turn it into a money ballot?

Who would’ve guessed it? While chess playing programs grabbed all the headlines, the real world changing app was solving crossword puzzles.

(Google stock recently passed $600 for the first time btw.
It begun at $85 a share, in August 2004.)

Another good thing that stemmed from High Fidelity was it’s introducing me to the first Bob Dylan song I actually liked: Most of the time (mp3, lyrics).

In an attempt to expand my melodic horizons I had previously downloaded his discography, planning to plod through it eventually. The going, though, proved sheer torture. I don’t like his voice nor his instruments, and all his songs seemed to blend into the same inane harmonica.

When I first listened to Most of the Time I thought an old black woman was singing. I liked the pace though, and I started listening. The structure revealed with a couple of lines and I was hooked. In its epistrophe^WP and nostalgia it reminds me a lot of Alberto Cortez’s Distancia (mp3, lyrics).

I started browsing around with more method (listening the intersection between his discography and Rolling Stone’s 500 greatest songs of all time). I “discovered” I want you, Like a Rolling Stone, Lay Lady Lay, Blowing in the wind, Mr. Tambourine man, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, and Visions of Johanna. Most I’d heard before, covered, but I’d never really listened to them. A masterful songwriter (he’s been nominated several times for a lit Nobel) with “unusual” voice and renditions, Dylan reminds me a lot of Jose Alfredo Jimenez^WP and Georges Moustaki^WP: they’re all acquired tastes, popularized by covers, appreciated only after attentive overexposure. All of which is fine by me, acquired tastes tend, oddly, to be the most rewarding.