“the singularity”
34 posts under this tag.
I have always envied Alexander the Great, because he had Aristotle as a personal tutor. In those days, Aristotle knew pretty much everything there was to know. Even better, Aristotle understood the mind of Alexander. He understood which topics interested Alexander, what Alexander knew and did not know, and what kinds of explanations Alexander preferred. Aristotle had been a student of Plato, and he was himself a great teacher. We know from his writings that he was full of examples, explanations, arguments, and stories. Through Aristotle, Alexander had the knowledge of the world at his command.
With that, Danny HillisW, E introduces his idea for Aristotle, an AI tutor that will move in a smarter web he calls the knowledge web. I find his dream somewhat unconvincing, somewhat pedantically unrealistic and somewhat suspicious of oversimplification. (Even though he considers it but a steppingstone towards Neal Stephenson’s Young Lady’s Illustrated PrimerWP, ELZR, which I love.) It is from the eminent responses to his essay where there’s gold.
Ah, the ever-recurring techno-myth: a dirt-cheap educational contraption to revolutionize third world children’s education. I can’t even remember when I heard about it first. I was thrilled though, enthused. But then with the undelivering years went my excitement. For one thing, the deployment plan is based almost entirely on governments, which is a nonstarter. More importantly, there might be better options. Cellphones are already a phenomenal worldwide success, even in the poorest countries, and that’s because they’re tangibly, immediately useful. A recent Economist article, Splitting the Digital Divide, mentions other less obvious but intriguing options.
And yet, reading yesterday’s New York Times article, For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs Big Debate (yup, there’s been some price adjustment), made me think again of the amazing possibilities that can unfold from a personal mobile computer in the hands of a child. Blame it on Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond AgeAM with its amazing book-machine, the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer —every self-learner’s wet dream.
At any rate, it seems to me that (save actual existence and deployment) the crucial factor for success will be software and so, for what it’s worth, here’s a promise: If and when Negroponte’s brainchild ever sees daylight, I shall stop whatever I’m doing, for three months, to develop mindblowing educational software for it. There, I said it.
Hace unos dias ya que Ben me aviso que, justo despues de un roce con la muerte, Daniel DennettWP acababa de escribir una carta, Thank Goodness!, en la que respondia a sus amigos que le preguntaban si en algo se habia afectado su largamente publico ateismo.
La carta me impresiono muchisimo inmediatamente, porque atendia varias preguntas que me estaba haciendo en ese momento (recuerdo que ese mismo dia le decia a mi hermana Chepe en el cafe, medio en broma y medio no, que si realmente no queriamos morir por que no nos volviamos doctores (como Chemito!) y nos poniamos a investigar?) y porque me emociono tremendamente el estilo conciliador pero firme, tan brillantemente elegante, de Dennett. En cierta forma la carta es una buena y sosegada continuacion a la carta elegiacaELZR de Eliezer Yudkowsky a su fallecido hermano Yehuda—aquella carta que tanto me marco en su momento, que tanto ame por su cruda rabia y su descarnado optimismo, y que traduje al Español casi por reflejo (reflejo que fue muy gratamente reforzado cuando mi primo Paco me dijo que le llevo la traduccion a sus alumnos de prepa).
He traducido, tambien casi por reflejo, esta carta de Daniel Dennett y se encuentra disponible aqui, como una hoja aparte: Gracias al bien!. Fue una traduccion mucho mas dificil por aquellas oraciones increibles y barrocas de Dennett asi que por favor dejen un mensaje si se les ocurre cualquier forma de mejorar la traduccion. (Gracias, por cierto, a Chemito por asesoria medica en la traduccion.)
Ojala lo lean, ojala los haga pensar y ojala nos veamos en los proximos dias con sus opiniones. (Para ser escritas, las mias tendran que esperar todavia unos dias a que aterrice el desorden de ideas que traigo—esta carta de Dennet me condujo al movimiento de los brightsWP, a las ultimas ediciones de Wired, Time, y Newsweek, a los escritos de Dawkins, a Edge, a leer ciencia, a discusiones, coming-outs, y a muchos, muchos pequeños repensamientos propios).
I’m sure I’ve seen the stats before, several times, but still I was disconcerted when I read this paragraph:
As of mid-1981, according to Steve Bloom, author of Video Invaders, more than four billion quarters had been dropped into Space InvadersWP games around the world—that’s roughly “one game per earthling.”
Four billion quarters seemed a wild guess, but four billion people? In 1981? Surely there was something wrong with the reference. But there wasn’t. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, that was the approximate number of people only 25 years ago.
More alarming still, my dad was born in 1957. World population was around 3 billion then. We’re 6.5 billion now and counting. That is, my parents’ lifetime has seen the world population double—3.5 billion new souls.
I had surely seen a similar graph several times before but somehow it never got through my thick skull. I was overjoyed to realize just to what extent the world had changed in less than 50 years. Frankly, I believe I’ve found the proof I’d been looking for that the world is getting better. Isn’t it unambiguously a good thing that 3.5 billion people have been able to be born? Yes, many will live in what are to us abysmal conditions. But there is no worst quality of life than not being able to live in the first place. Death is always an option, life is not. Most of this growth comes from the poorest classes of the poorest countries but that’s also heartening in a way. There was never before reason to counteract the “ignorance” that made them try to have as many children as they physically could—it wasn’t ignorance at the time, it was bet-splitting. Most of them died anyway.
Never have so many children had the luxury of extreme poverty, to put it bluntly.
The other number shock today was from a talk by Google’s Marissa Mayer, platonic love and Google’s VP of search products and user experience:
[Starting around minute 3.25:] Most people are familiar with the concept that computers get faster all the time, they get about twice as fast every two years. It’s a law inside of computer science. But it turns out the same thing is happening with hard drives. So, around every thirteen months you can store as much information in the same amount of space on a hard drive, because the technology has advanced. Which means that every ten years you can store a thousand times as much information. So I thought I would again try and give you a sense of, in everyday form, how much content that is or how much this could change things. What this means is that if you consider a typical iPod, which today can hold tens of thousands of songs, [it] means that something the size of an iPod could actually, in the year 2012, carry an entire year of video on it, playing nonstop without repeats. By 2015 it could have all commercial music ever produced. Imagine buying an iPod where all the music is already loaded on it and you just decide what you want to access. By 2019 it could carry an entire lifetime of video in the palm of your hand, 85 years worth of video will be able to fit in an iPod. And by somewhere in the years 2020 you’ll be able to have every content ever created, sitting in the palm of your hand. Hhmmm…huuumm. Hhmmm…huuumm.
Again, I’ve played with such numbers before. It’s just they had never hit me so hard.
It’s a beautiful copyright-infringement shooting star. Enjoy it while it lasts. (Via reddit.)
Second LifeWP, a 3d online community, recently hosted a live concert by Suzanne VegaWP and of course someone had to make her and her guitar’s avatars. Robbie Dingo did. And he made a video of the making (of the guitar avatar). Breathtaking. Go straight to the Quickitime video or see it embedded as a flash in Second Life’s website.
In the post-scarcity society of Cory Doctorow’s fun Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom (which you can read for free), money has been replaced by whuffieWP: a reputation-based currency, an ubiquitous measure of how much other people like you. Now, of course, PageRankWP comes immediately to mind, no? (And here’s a good post linking both.) But the main difference till now was that whuffie was instantly viewable by anyone (through brain implants!) and PageRank is just a behind-the-scenes measure (though of course tremendously important).
No more. I installed Firefox Extension Search Status in a flight of fancy but it has become second nature to me to look down and right at the status bar icon where PageRank (and AlexaWP Traffic) is displayed. We are social animals after all.
Speaking of human possibilitiesELZR, I have found my personal slogan. No need to be jelous of Andrea’sELZR anymore.
In a book aptly called New Bottles for New Wine, Julian Huxley WP quotes his grandfather, the great nineteenth-century scientist Thomas Huxley WP, on the subject of belief: ”Everyone should be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him. My faith is in human possibilities.”
Ellen J. Langer, MindfulnessAM, p195
Just good fun writing. On the singularity to boot. To be read with that eemadge from Moravec I always quote in such settings.
Perhaps the week’s biggest and scariest robot news, though—certainly for journalists—was the robot reporters story.
Thomson Financial has been using automatic computer programs to generate news stories for almost six months. The machines can spit out wire-ready copy based on financial reports a mere 0.3 seconds after receiving the data. Thomson management likes its reporter robots so much that it has decided to expand the fleet.
Flesh-and-blood journalists were quick to decry the move. “Those editors who can’t wait to install computers at the expense of journalists should beware,” warned Mark Tran in the Guardian article “Robots write the news.”
“Look at what happened in Space Odyssey, when HAL took over the spaceship. Or worse still, think of Terminator 3, when the Skynet network of computers unleashes nuclear war.”
Tran was joking. Well, half joking. But his joke was also a poignant plea. A robot may be able to turn a share report into three pithy paragraphs in less than a second, but it can’t go and watch movies about other robots and turn that into a warning for the world.
Because it can’t live, it can’t think. Or so we think. Tran’s conclusion isn’t very reassuring. “We endangered financial journalists could prolong our lives in the short term by slapping more adjectives into our copy,” he suggests, “but the writing does seem to be on the wall, as far as earnings reports go.” If all that stands between a writer’s job and redundancy is a few adjectives, well, that’s plain scary.
”Scary”—yes, nice adjective. It’s got human emotion, empathy, experience. Good, we’re still on the right side of the Turing Test the side the robots can’t get to.
Or can they? I can hear the laments already, with 20/20 hindsight. First they came for the bomb disposal crews, and we said nothing. Then they were spot-welding and spray-painting on the auto plant assembly lines, and still we said nothing. Only now that they’ve come for the journalism jobs do the journalists scream. But it’s too late.
Mistrust and paranoia have set in. How do we know Mark Tran isn’t already a robot? “Tran”—does that even sound like a human name?
It’s a losing battle. These days, it seems, there are fewer and fewer jobs a robot couldn’t do. Even automatic translation, which some said only humans could do properly (because meaning requires context and context requires lived experience) is coming on by leaps and bounds, pulling jobs out from under the feet of the lower-level human translators.
Heh, that “first, then, now” schtick never grows old. Here’s another instance of it.
That last paragraph of the quote was included simply for Chepe & Andrea, the two wonderful translators-to-be in my life, to read and grok. It’s not that I don’t support such a lovely liberal-arts profession (I’ve surely considered it for myself in several occasions). I simply believe it’s going to be among the next professions to be submergedEE by AI, and seafaring success thereon will require a different skillset and attitude.
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