“technology”
89 posts under this tag.
The offhand references, several per paragraph, to mind-bending concepts (animal uploading, the first AIs, reputation markets, stream-of-consciousness blogs, metacortex, algamics, post-scarcity economy, AIneko, Matrioshka brains, computronium, 3D printers…); the reckless pace; the nonpareil geek protagonist, Mannfred Macx, a “venture altruist”; the kinky BDSM sex thread; its undeniable modernity; its staggering density (this is an information-overload short-story; to be read with Google, Slashdot, Answers.com, and Wikipedia handy)... Charlie Stross’s Lobsters is as unique a sci-fi short story as you’re likely to find. It has been almost a year since I read it but in the meantime it has only become more impressive, more unnerving in its increasing overlap with our present. It was the story that made me believe again in a literature that said something about my present, about our impending singularity future. It’s also the first story of Stross’s Accelerando novel, easily one of the best nonfiction books of 2005 (and it’s not like I don’t see its flaws, it’s that his daring more than makes up for them).
Truth be told, I usually find Jaron Lanier obnoxious, unconvincing, and mushy. His obsession to fancy himself the last bastion of humanism amid the rabid, materialistic techno-geeks bores me, and, though he’s a virtual reality pioneer, I’d never found any of his ideas particularly visionary. Until yesterday.
I was teetering (with excitement) when I read his answer to Edge’s 2005 question: What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?:
My belief is that the potential for expanded communication between people far exceeds the potential both of language as we think of it (the stuff we say, read and write) and of all the other communication forms we already use.
He goes on to describe what must surely be one of the most mind-blowing ideas I’ve ever read: “post-symbolic communication.” (Yup, I’ve got the weirdest fetish with symbols themselves—which seems to me to be the mother of all fetishes.) Anyway, wow. That sort of thing is precisely what I imagine when I ramble madly about VR to people (Sergio and Beca can attest to that) only to get the same dull, unimpressed answer: “So what? It’s all fake.” (As if they don’t already spend well over half of their lives in media, which is just another name for artificial, fake, realities: the web, IM, TV, movies, books, games, radio, ads…)
But I digress. I think this extract from an interview to Lanier, The giant worm to Saturn (~1000 words), is a great intro to “post-symbolic communications”. Go read it.
Today, in what I’m sure is an increasingly common occurrence to everyone, I was uncertain on a subtle language question and I googled it. The interesting thing was that I didn’t do that to get somewhere, to find any particular webpage, I only cared about the result numbers.
You see, I wasn’t sure whether you wrote “that’s a clever move of their part” or “that’s a clever move on their part.” Prepositions are one of the nastiest, most irrational things in every language. In Spanish you would use the equivalent of “of” in the equivalent expression and I’m guessing that’s what led me astray.
The worst thing is that dictionaries are no help at all in this regard, they just throw at you an impossibly long chain of usage cases. Enter Google. All it took to answer my question was a quick google for ”on their part” and one for ”of their part” (quotes included!). The first query had 2,820,000 results, the second 146,000. The winner was clear, my question was settled.
But it was unnerving. The web has swallowed our language with all its subtleties—it ought to make for one heck of a primeval soup. Don’t you get this feeling every so often that Google is this close to being able to do true translation? This close to understanding? This close to speaking? Do you think it’s not hearing us right now?
Storage space and computing power are dirt cheap; our task isn’t to “use them efficiently,” it’s to “squander them creatively.”
Or I could tell you about the time Apple released an unbelievably cool, unbelievably wasteful, 3d-rotating user-switching. The best description I read, and it still reads on the feature page: “Because we can.”
Neural nets are a popular technique in Artificial Intelligence based on simplified models of neurons and interneuronal connections gathered from brain research. Ray Kurzweil describes them pretty well here:
One basic approach to neural nets can be described as follows. Each point of a given input (for speech, each point represents two dimensions, one being frequency and the other time; for images, each point would be a pixel in a two-dimensional image) is randomly connected to the inputs of the first layer of simulated neurons. Every connection has an associated synaptic strength, which represents its importance and which is set at a random value. Each neuron adds up the signals coming into it. If the combined signal exceeds a particular threshold, the neuron fires and send a signal to its output connection; if the combined input signal does not exceed the threshold, the neuron does not fire, and its output is zero. The output of each neuron is randomly connected to the inputs of the neurons in the next layer. There are multiple layers (generally three or more), and the layers may be organized in a variety of configurations. For example, one layer may feed back to an earlier layer. At the top layer, the output of one or more neurons, also randomly selected, provides the answer.
What hit me as I was reading this was how eerily close is society (as in human society) to a neural net. Think about it. Have you ever wondered how there are so many great and worthy causes being fought out there that you are not taking part of? You read, listen, think, and sometimes chat about them (you’re adding up the signals coming into you), but the signals simply do not exceed your (mostly random) threshold, and you don’t “fire”, you don’t act, your output is zero. (Street children and the EFF are the first examples that come to my mind, what are yours?)
Take me, for example: after many years of almost total political apathy, I’m close to releasing a web-app about Mexican Politics —in other words, I’ve become political (!)— because in the previous weeks several inputs conspired (somewhat randomly) to spur me into action. I’m an excited neuron in this weird, tragic brain that is Mexico and I only wish that I can get my next layer of neighboring neurons to fire.
Here’s a parting thought: media (and particularly ads) are the neurotransmitters of the hive mind.
I used to laugh at the elaborate calculations and stratospheric numbers you always find when reading papers about the limits of computation —as in, say, “Just how much computations per second might the entire universe theoretically support?”. It was something more than my incredulity (it involves too much hand-waving at times), it was simply indifference. So what if the universe could theoretically handle one zillion jillions to the gazillion cps? We might as well ponder how many angels might fit on the head of a pin…
I read Ray Kurzweil answer 3 weeks ago and it hasn’t stopped resounding on my head ever since:
Because computation underlies the foundations of everything we care about, from the economy to human intellect and creativity, we might well wonder: are there ultimate limits to the capacity of matter and energy to perform computation? If so, what are these limits, and how long will it take to reach them?
Our human intelligence is based on computational processes that we are learning to understand. We will ultimately multiply our intellectual powers by applying and extending the methods of human intelligence using the vastly greater capacity of nonbiological computation. So to consider the ultimate limits of computation is really to ask: what is the destiny of our civilization?
In which the soundscape is presented and used as an introduction to other synthetic synesthesias.
A few months ago my family got a new van, a Windstar. It’s a pretty good car and, being a luxe edition, has many interesting gizmos. My favorite one is a sensor that starts screeching when you get too close to something in the back.
It is not its human-augmentation side what fascinates me the most, but the possibilities that such a sensor suggests. Why not go crazy and make this a gizmo that truly represents space, in all its subtleties, through sound?
I envision a somewhat thick, solid, black band that you would close around your head, completely covering your eyes and your ears; somewhat like a headband worn too low.
This gadget, the soundscape (scape for short), will simply translate space into sound. Let’s imagine the simplest case. A soundscaper standing in the center of a medium-sized, empty, white, circular room. What would that sound like? Well, as the soundscaper turns, it’d probably be a soft hum in all directions; medium-volumed to represent a medium distance; high-pitched to represent the whiteness of the walls; equal in all directions to parallel the physical reality.
If we increase the diameter of this circular room, the walls move farther away, and thus the (sound) volume will decrease; if we decrease the diameter, the walls come closer and the volume increases. If this room now had a door and it were open, the soundscaper would notice it as it turns around to “hear” the room: it would be a sudden sharp decrease in the volume.
If we now put a black square somewhere in the room close to the soundscaper, it’d sound like a squared speaker the size of the black square, emitting a somewhat loud, low-pitched noise.
Can you imagine it? Yeah, who knows if it would have a practical use (assist the blind?) and it’d probably never be advanced enough to allow you to, say, “read” a book through pure sound, but it sure’d be interesting to use it.
Of course, there’s no reason to stop at sound, maybe space can be represented through smell too (and maybe, just maybe, through taste). We always think of space as something fundamentally visual but that’s only because we’re all so visually biased. There are other possibilities.
And yet, sight is probably the best way to represent space. It’s by far the sense with the biggest bandwith. So much, in fact, that I think at least two other senses (hearing and smelling) can be merged into it. Thanks to sci-fi movies we’re all familiar now with some sort of thermal vision—in which red represents hotness, blue coldness. Hearing and smelling could be added in a similar fashion. Sound could be represented as an overlay of 3d waves expanding rapidly through space. The sound of birds chirping outside would look like a pond under a light rain, only in 3d. And smell could be represented as an overlay of little colored dots. A nubile girl passing by would leave a rainbow cloud of dots behind her.
But the soundscape still sounds the most daring, maybe because the possibility of replacing sight is as frightening as it is exciting. Just imagine, sound as light!
Update August 24, 2006: ABC News’ Humans With Amazing Senses: Blind People Who Interact With the World Like Dolphins and Bats
Update April 24, 2007: Wired’s Mixed Feelings: See with your tongue. Navigate with your skin. Fly by the seat of your pants (literally). I blogged about it here.
In which a philosophical quote provides the sparkle for some more talking on philosophical things like the self and civilization.
It is a time when, even if nets were to guide all consciousness that had been converted to photons and electrons towards coalescing, standalone individuals have not yet been converted into data to the extent that they can form unique components of a larger complex.
That’s the chilling intro to Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Honestly, when I first read it I thought it was mere Engrish, but now that I’ve come to terms with its form (I’m even starting to like it), I can’t get its content out of my head. It’s just so powerful.
It makes you think of civilization as one long gradient towards ever larger complexes. A very interesting lens with which to revisit many important events and inventions: family, clans, money, speaking, writing, printing, law, contracts, corporations, science, the net, IP, blogs, wiki, mailing lists, email, IM, whatnot.
And it reminds me a lot of a favorite essay of mine—one I stumbled across a few years ago in wonderful serendipity: Erosion of the Essential Self. In it, it is argued that our sense of self is being made increasingly obsolete by technology, and that this may not necessarily be a bad thing. One of the interesting points it makes is that our sense of self itself is probably a byproduct of written culture: “In ongoing, face-to-face conversation, we are little concerned with the mind behind the words; meaning is shaped before us in the course of the interchange. However, with the emergence of printed text, important questions were created about the ‘author’s meaning.’” It’s one of those essays that simply becomes a part of you afterwards, something like this:
I was amazed and impressed by the brilliance of GEB when I first read it, but it didn’t change my life. However over the years I kept finding myself returning to its insights, and each time I would arrive at them at a deeper level. Now I find them my own thoughts, and I realize I now see the world through a similar lens.
Bob represents the domestication of the personal computer, in the pejorative sense of the word, turning the miraculous shape-shifting capacities of these machines into a dulled repetition of everyday, household reality.
The real magic of graphic computers derives from the fact that they’re not tied to the old, analog world of objects. They can mimic much of that world of course, but they’re also capable of adopting new identities and performing new tasks that have no real-world equivalent whatsoever. People who get hooked on computers get hooked for this reason. They don’t become high-tech junkies because their machines remind them of their Rolodexes; they’re junkies because their machines do things they never thought possible. Interface design should reflect this newness, this range of possibility.
Amen.
Good ole Tetris is a wonderful example of those possibilities, of that unreality, and so is Photoshop. For a more recent, fascinating example look no further than the Namekuji game (but be warned, by clicking this link you therewith relinquish the next couple of hours).
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