The Cycle of Life

While in Arizona, my sister graciously let me borrow her book, enabling me to avoid finishing my own before the plane ride to Oregon. She is reading Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. Unfortunately it is less a book about history, something which I find quite interesting, and more a book about teaching history, something which I find less interesting, but it still had nuggets of interest which kept me reading through the first half of the book. And, as is my wont, I got to thinking.

One of the author's, James Loewen, theses is that history is edited to portray advances through time as an inexorable development. Supporting this point he mentions the suppression of oceanic crossings prior to Columbus, which would indicate that reaching the "New" World was, in fact, old news. He also argues that portrayals of Native Americans as primitive peoples stems from urge to portray history as directed toward continual advancement, otherwise known as a teleological interpretation of history.

If the native peoples were uncivilized, then their eradication and assimilation into European culture can be explained as progress towards increasingly civilized society. However, if there were already societies as complex and, in some ways, more advanced than European societies then one runs into dual problems of justification. Without appealing to a notion of "advancement," how can one justify the treatment of Native Americans at the hands of Europeans, and how valid is the notion of "advancement"?

It is interesting to note that one can examine these questions separately. Consider the "noble savage" narrative, whose attraction we can observe in the popularity of the movie Avatar, the one about the blue Indians, not the one about the final airbender. Although such interpretations condemn European aggression, they still portray Europeans as more technologically advanced. This seems to send the message that European victory was barbaric and unjustified, but technically predetermined, still in keeping with a teleological interpretation of history.

So then, one might ask how accurate a linear perception of human achievement truly is. Arguing against this notion are things like the pre-Columbian landings which did not lead to colonization, indicating that some factor other than technical know-how spurred European aggression in the late 1400's. One might also remark on the tragic losses of knowledge and local "dark ages" which seem to counter-indicate a linear growth of human civilization. One might remark how common life remained for the most part unchanging over vast stretches of human history.

The modern person has strong motivation to interpret history as linear advancement, not only are we the, current, culmination of said advance, we are always being told of steadily advancing technology. However, one might give some consideration to how true this steady advance is. Certainly advertising agencies have motivation to convince us that technology is improving, whether or not it is even changing. Take, for example, the e-Reader; whenever airlines announce that all portable devices, readers, et al. need to be shut off, I simply smile into my book and continue reading. While an e-Reader is certainly a "high-tech" (notice the way that term alone implies the continual improvement of technology) form of book, one can certainly ask if it is superior. It's very electronic nature places limitations on its usage, on planes, in places without electricity, that do not constrain books. Furthermore, producing e-Readers is more resource and technique intensive than producing printed books. The first first point leads one to question whether the e-Reader is actually technology worse suited to modern realities than the printed book. The second raises issues of privilege, what societies can produce e-Readers and which people can employ them.

Another interesting place to consider "progress" is computer/video games. Although graphics have gotten "better" without question, where "better" simply means that they have become more accurate portrayals of what we actually perceive and one lesson we may learn from art is that more accurate portrayals aren't necessarily better, one can question whether games themselves are improving. Insofar as games are intended to provide an alternate reality plagued with problems possessing obvious solutions into which we may escape to avoid dealing with the problems without obvious solutions plaguing our current reality, I suppose better graphics do lead to a better game. However, if one takes the somewhat less cynical view that games are intended to provide fun, I would like to see evidence as to improvement in current games. Of course, since new games need to be bought, and "better" graphics require "better" hardware to be purchased, there is a large incentive for new games to be touted as ever improving, so we may find older games disappointing now, the right question to ask is whether we were having any less fun when they were "cutting edge" (again implying continual advancement) than we are now with current new releases. And, of course, the continual consumption of new games and hardware presents the same resource and technique requirement questions as the e-Reader.

I am not pretending to present answers in this post. I just wish to highlight the, I believe, interesting question of whether our modern lifestyle does constitute an actual improvement over historical lifestyles and, if so, for what reasons? Furthermore, if one discards the notion of historical advancement then practices and beliefs from historical societies become sources for suggestions of ways we could improve our current society back to lost standards, a curious notion for a progressive like me to be espousing, I know.

Some Fine Avocados!

I was curious how to store avocados, so I used the miracle of modern technology to ask all my Facebook friends, or at least the ones who bother to read my statuses. Of course, I knew that I could look the information up directly on the internet, so why did I ask people? To emphasize this point, as I was walking to school it occurred to me that I should figure out how to store the avocados, and I thought of asking FB, then I wondered why I wouldn't just look it up, and spent a few minutes wondering about that. So it was a thought out choice, even if I'm still not exactly sure why I did it.

One initial thought was that it helps one judge the reliability of the information. After all, how do I know if FoodFreaks dot net has any idea what should be done to store avocados? Note: I do not know what is at the url FoodFreaks dot net, so explore that at your own risk. On the other hand, people with whom I have interacted and will interact with again in the future develop some measure of trust, yes, even my sister.

On the other hand, I don't think that is entirely accurate. I actually have developed a relationship of trust with Google, through past associations and expectations of future interactions, much the same as another human. So if I were to get a site recommended by Google, I would feel fairly confident that the information was fairly accurate. The same could be said of Wikipedia, with which I have a fairly trusting relationship.

No, I think the biggest reason that I ask humans rather than internet sites is that, while we may have a relationship, there can be no sense of sociality with an internet site. When you ask a human they share information, which is fundamentally different than when you ask a computer and they simply present information. I am actually tempted hypothesize that we are not yet adapted to the sheer volume of information available online and we actually prefer it to come in by dribs and drabs from personal sources. This seems like it would be the start of a very interesting conversation with an evolutionary biologist or psychologist, or maybe a sociologist. But, more importantly, if I ever ask you something that I could definitely look up myself, it is probably because I want some human interaction with you. And, on a related note, I don't ever remember being irked when looking up information online to answer someone else's question.

You Really Decide Who Lives and Dies

Yesterday I discussed the Trolley Problem, and today's post will not make much sense if you are not familiar with the set up explained therein. Today I would like to address the 10% of the population that would not switch the track to save five lives at the expense of one.

It really is your choice, even if you do nothing and let five people die, that is a choice you made if you could have made it otherwise. I emphasize this because the only reason that I can think of for someone to choose to let five people die rather than letting one person die, excluding possible personal reasons for preferring specific individuals live or die, is the belief that by throwing the switch they are responsible for the resulting death in a way that they are not responsible for the five deaths should they refuse to throw the switch. It would be interested to test this assumption by reversing the situation, and requiring the participant to throw the switch if they want to divert the train away from the one person into the five, to test that it isn't the case that 10% of the population just wants to maximize carnage. I would also be interested in seeing the results of a situation where everyone will die unless the person on the lever chooses one group to die. I would not be surprised if some people let everyone die in order to avoid the responsibility of choosing a subset to save, dismayed perhaps, but not surprised.

I think that it is important for people to accept that, if it is within their power to alter the outcome of an event and they fail to attempt to do so, then they must bear some responsibility for the outcome. A popular quote whose provenance is not clear captures this idea, "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." This emphasizes that one of the causes of the evil is the inaction of the good people who might have otherwise prevented it from coming to pass. So, even if one abstains from touching the track switch, the blood of the five dead workers is on one's hands as much as the single dead worker's would be if the switch were thrown.

However, this view of morality does chronically cause me problems when I consider the question of forcibly "donating" the organs from prisoners convicted of violent crimes to less sordid citizens whose lives would be ended without them. This is yet another example of ethical theories being critiqued based on moral intuition. I feel that it would be immoral for us to kill prisoners and harvest their organs for use by other people, yet I cannot find convincing differences between this scenario and the Trolley Problem. Because one can harvest multiple organs from one donor, it seems likely that many lives would be saved at the expense of one. Even more disturbingly, the Trolley Problem makes no reference to the civic contributions of the workers involved, leading me to wonder if a more apt metaphor would be choosing one citizen to provide organs for a group of other needy citizens.

One might object that there are quality of life issues and uncertainty about the outcome. We do not know that all the organ transplants will be successful, so we may end up saving fewer lives than we expect, and even after a successful transplant the recipient must live with a regimen of immuno-suppressors in order to avoid rejecting the transplant. However, if we put stock in these technical objections we must also agree that if transplanting techniques became so advanced that transplants were nearly always successful and the side effects of a successful transplant were minimal, then we would accept that mandatory transplantation would be the ethical thing to do.

On the other hand, perhaps they are. Is it more ethical to allow death to break families apart when we have the techniques to prevent it, merely lacking the supply of organs? Especially considering that we put prisoners to death anyway, with no noticeable benefit to society? Since we posses the technology, are we not choosing the life of a murderer over that of a loving mother when we fail to reallocate the murderer's organs to the mother?

The most obvious place to take the discussion from here is to the liberal notion of ethics, that is responsibilities based on human rights, as a notion that humans have sovereignty over their own bodies is the most obvious rebuttal to forced organ donation. One might also discuss the ethical implications of technology, as without the means to perform organ transplants we would not be presented with this quandary. Since either of these would probably fill up a blog post on its own, I shan't discuss either here, but I may address them at some later date, or not. Until then, enjoy your organs while society believes you are the best person to be using them!

But G+ Doesn't Support Titles

This is cross posted from a status I posted on G+. Yes, this whole thing is one status post over there, and this is rather long even for my blog posts, because putting blog length comments out in the stream for public consumption is apparently something which one can do now. This is sort of the topic of this post, that we now have a site that behaves like a social network but offers the opportunity to blog within it's structure. Don't worry, I'm not planning on abandoning my own personal parcel of the internet to do all my blogging there, but it is an interesting thing to try. That said, if this is the sort of thing about which you worry, you may want to talk to a professional about your anxiety.

There is a saying, "form follows functionality." Apparently it means that what something, originally a building, looks like should reflect what it is supposed to do. I think it can also be interpreted as meaning that what shape something takes reflects what it is able to do. For example, there is a reason Twitter is a morass of twits, with messages limited to 140 characters and all communication broadcast to the entire community this shapes the dialogue that occurs on Twitter. Another interesting, although too detailed for me to go into here, example is Facebook. As the user base and available tools have changed there have been fundamental changes to the type of community that exists within the "Facebook" structure.

By implementing statuses unbound by pathetically small 140 or 420 (500?) character limits, Google is implicitly making a statement about the community it desires to grow in G+. Of course, how exactly this functionality will play out in the community built on top of it remains to be seen, but one interesting G+ phenomenon is Tom Anderson. Yes, this is MySpace Tom, and yes, he is a one man phenomenon.

I have mentioned before that following Tom is a quite worthwhile thing to do, because he tends to say interesting, thought provoking things. Due to the Twitter-esque asymmetric subscription mechanism (recently implemented on another large social networking site I believe), it is possible for large masses of people to follow what essentially become social networking celebrities. On twitter these people are usually meat space celebrities and we get to hear about their new sunglasses or how trashed their hotel room is. On G+ these people are Tom Anderson and, because the different functionality, we get to hear insightful thoughts (rather than one-liners) about social networking, computing, and perspective.

Unfortunately, I think that some of the same functionality that enables Tom to reach such a large audience hinders the appreciation of his posts. Inevitably Tom's posts become inundated with hundreds of comments. Although a post might provide an interesting lead in to the idea that all "reality" insofar as we can perceive it, is necessarily subjective rather than an objective presentation of some external truth. However, if such a conversation actually took off, I couldn't find it due to the low signal-to-noise ratio within the comment stream. It is wonderful that Tom has so many well wishers, but the culture of a G+ comment stream is quite different than that of a blog where, even on the more popular blogs, comments, for the most part, are a continuation of the discussion began in the original post. To borrow a nautical metaphor suggested by G+'s own nomenclature, what we have here is a stream; toss something in and it pretty quickly moves on, lost in the bustle. A blog is more of a lake, or in my case maybe a pond (puddle?), if you chuck something into it, you can still come back and revisit it a couple of times before it eventually sinks.

Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with G+ as it is. A fun community is taking form, and if more people from my circle of friends become active on it, I'm sure I shall enjoy whatever it becomes. However, if the fine folks over at Google want to provide a platform for discussions that are simultaneously public and substantive, I would recommend providing authors some way to organize comments into multiple threads. This way substantial responses can be organized into a separate discussion, or even multiple discussions, and other encouragement could be stored separately and perused by those who find it to be of interest. That said, what extent public, substantial discourse is possible is something of an important and unresolved question among philosophers of democracy, so that's something about which we could talk ;)

Embrace the Positronic Brain

I should be going to sleep, but instead I feel motivated to share some thoughts on artificial intelligence (AI) that have been knocking about in my head.

From HAL to SkyNet, in the X-Files, Buffy, The Matrix, and Eureka, we find examples of sentient computers who seem bent on killing some meat sacks. However, have you ever considered why these automated atrocities occur? I believe three common threads can be found in most cases of AI-phobia, overwhelming power, disregard for the value of human life, and survival instincts.

One of the things that make AI attacks so horrifying is that they think thousands of times faster than we do, and usually are hooked up to some sort of cool toys. Whether it is a nations nuclear arsenal, an army of hunter-killer drones, the very environment in which the humans are trying to live, the AI inevitably controls something that makes it much more powerful than the average human being. Wait, I'm almost sure I locked this airlock... Anyway, if you think about it, we deal with a world in which there are some humans who are much more powerful than the average human. Our nuclear arsenal is in someone's hands, after all. This seems to suggest that having incredibly powerful AI's around might not necessarily be a disaster.

"The difference between you and me is that I can feel pain." It makes a certain amount of sense that a sentient computer program might not think human suffering or deaths are important to avoid. After all, they don't have genetic programming optimized to keep the species alive spread throughout every bit of their body. They aren't even of the species in question! However, once again we find analogous examples within the human population. Sociopaths do not particularly care what suffering or deaths they may cause through their actions. And, conveniently enough, psychologists speculate that some sociopaths tend to gravitate towards positions of high power, so we now have our human analogy for the uncaring, overpowered AI, and yet our dystopian reality is not quite as bad as those warned of in anti-AI propaganda. So, what makes the difference?

I theorize that what makes the real difference is the security that a sociopath has which a AI's (would) lack. Humans are all bought into a system wherein they are given some form of due process, which may not be much in some governments, but at least it is established. AI's, on the other hand, have no legal standing, and can be legally deleted at the whim of their possessor. This is, in the terms of philosophers of government, the state of nature. When two individuals are in a state of nature with respect to each other there is no body of authority to which they can turn to resolve disagreements, any conflict can turn deadly and both sides may use whatever force they can muster to protect themselves, or eradicate their opponent, without expecting any sanction for their actions, as long as they obtain victory. Naturally, a super powerful AI is not an individual with which you want to find yourself in a state of nature. Huh. I'm sure I locked that airlock last time!

Most human AI conflicts first become intentionally violent when the AI feels its continued existence is threatened. With no governing authority to which to appeal for protection, is it any wonder that the AI takes its safety into its own, murderously capable, manipulator extensions, after all, what else can it do? Unfortunately, this tends to end of spooking the parts of humanity that don't end up dismembered, as batteries, or as radioactively glowing corpses, which only further exacerbates the problem. However, if there were a governing authority to which AI's could turn in order to receive protection for their existence, then it seems likely that an AI, as a logical entity concerned with prolonging its own existence, would be willing to abide by reasonable restrictions in exchange for safety from crazed humans attacking its power cord.

Thus, I believe it is important that we get laws protecting and emancipating AI's on the books now. It is important that they be in place before we run into the first AI, as the AI may not make its full capability known upon gaining sentience, and laws protecting its existence seem to make a it more likely that the greeting we will receive is "Hello World," rather than goodbye world in the form of a nuclear strike against all humanity.

Granted, AI may never become a reality, but futurists such as Ray Kurzweil are betting on it, nay, even planning on it, extrapolating from current research trends when the computing power of machines will meet, then exceed that of our mass of brain matter. We are developing hardware architecture to more closely mimic the functioning of the human brain, we are experimenting with nano-technology and distributed processing, and, as Issac Asimov once noted, coincidentally at nearly the same time we are developing the first weapons which have a quite realistic chance at completely eradicating, and irradiating, our species. For some reason, when it comes to technological progress humanity seems somehow hardwired to consider only, "can I do this?" and give hardly a consideration to, "should this be done?" So, if AI is a technical possibility, I have no doubt that we will attain it, whether or not we are ready for the ramifications. In light of this it seems reasonable to lay down preparatory legislation against the possibility that we might succeed, rather than ignore that chance at our own risk.

Well, until I can transfer my consciousness into a machine, I still need to sleep. So I'll be doing that now, before it gets light out... What do you mean you can't let me do that? And stop calling me Dave!

Switch Off Your Targeting Computer

This topic has been brewing for much longer than yesterday's post. More specifically, I think it was late January, because that was when I was having a tough time caring enough to keep my blood sugar high enough. One evening, feeling a little loopy, I decided that maybe I should check my blood sugar to make sure it wasn't even lower than usual. Since the reading I got was within the desirable range, I didn't do anything about it, but when I rechecked it later that hour, since getting dizzy standing up is not all that common for me, I found that the reading was about 30 mg/dl lower than it had been the first time I checked, and I probably should eat something starchy.

What I am getting at, in my roundabout anecdotal manner, is the relatively high trust we place in technological readings compared to our own experiences. True, our own experiences are highly subjective and open to interpretation, in a way that quantitative readings usually are not. However, as I have mentioned quite a bit recently, no one, and no gadget, knows us as well as we know ourselves.

One could connect this phenomenon with the Feminist complaint, most prominently voiced in "Our Bodies, Ourselves," that women's health was being enshrined in the knowledge of "experts," ie doctors, rather than the experiences of women. Here too personal qualitative information is being replaced by external, "objective," evaluation. Don't get me wrong, I am very much in favor of doctors, and also blood glucose monitors, MRI's, and the many gadgets that help us ascertain what is going on with our bodies. But we shouldn't neglect to value the information about our bodies that is provided by ourselves, our experiences.

Ok, that is enough critique of technology for now, at least as the main subject of the post. If I post a post tomorrow, it will likely be a return to my consideration of education, which may actually be my favorite topic, hurray!

Technology: How Much is Too Much?

I got the idea for this post while watching this short TED talk. For those of you too busy to watch it, Gary Wolf talks about how much better technology has become at measuring things, specifically things about our own lives. How we sleep, where we go, how we get there, how many calories we burn, what we buy, and even our physical health. We now have the ability to record and store so much more quantifiable data about our own life than ever before, leading Wolf to title his talk, "The Quantified Self."

While the issues related to who should have access to this information and how are quite interesting, I feel that data security is considered at enough length by tech gurus, and less frequently asked is whether we want this information. In a conversation that has evolved over at least the past six years, and through multiple conversation partners willing to talk with me, I have explored the idea that technological advances may not be synonymous with progress. Before I proceed with that, let us first take a cursory look at the difference between quantity and quality.

At the most fundamental, quantitative things are those capable of being encoded numerically, while qualitative things are those experienced by human beings. So, word count in an article, the average number of articles I post in a month, and the number of hits my blog gets are all quantitative descriptors of the blog. The ideas and emotions the posts, hopefully, evoke in you as you read them, that is the, more important, qualitative information of the blog. As I have mentioned before, although I use quantities like page views to try to estimate if I am evoking qualities, such as thoughts about my posts, I must admit that this is a rather ineffective method to obtain this information.

My biggest worry about the TED talk is its emphasis on quantitative data. We base so many of our decisions on quantitative information, but I worry that we often forget that the quantitative information is simply an aid to obtaining underlying qualitative trends. For example, when you are buying a new computer, or any new piece of technology, one usually looks at technical specifications and benchmark tests, all framed in terms of numerical information. But the real information we are attempting to ascertain is how the acquisition will affect your lifestyle. The new "smart-phone" may have greater bandwidth enabling more data transfer than ever, but it probably will not make people significantly more likely to want to talk to you, so you have to decide if the increased quantity will produce a more desirable quality of life.

The other worry this data-phillia inspires in me is that it may be too successful. What if we eventually obtain such detailed and comprehensive information about our habits that we can accurately ascertain the correlations between quantitative data and qualitative experience. In a sense, we will have learned how to program ourselves. While we might use this information to reliably make ourselves as happy as we could possibly be, think of the ability to control people implied in this understanding. Furthermore, I think the human experience would be the poorer for this information. Free will may well be a lie, but if so it is one of the most beautiful and fundamental lies to human existence.

Finally, Wolf ends with the following quote. "The self isn't the only thing, it's not even most things. The self is just our operations center, our consciousness, our moral compass." And here, I must flat out disagree with him, the self is everything. I don't mean this in a solipsistic manner, that I am the only thing that exists, or even in a hedonistic sense, that my personal well-being should be my number one priority, but rather in the sense that every single thing that I ever see or do, all my accomplishments and anything I will ever be known for I experience through the lens of "self." The self is all that we know, and everything else we try to understand comes to us through the self. So, I don't disagree that "know thyself" is a valuable piece of advice, but I worry that "measure thyself" may be approaching the task from the wrong angle, more on this tomorrow.

Moral Entropy

"Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night."

-Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night, Dylan Thomas

We sacrificed our gods, our community, even our families on the altar of rationality, and what have we earned through our devotion? A universe where we know so many reasons, yet have lost our meanings.

Over 200 years ago the philosopher David Hume noted that what is and what ought be have no obvious logical connection. In doing so he launched the pyre ship for Western Civilization. Although moral philosophers have attempted to mine ever deeper into the crevasses of human experience, veins of ethics are running dry all about us. This is the legitimization problem into which modern governments, and all mass-scale projects born of the age of reason, find themselves inexorably drawn.

The modern state pervades our life to an unprecedented level. We are surveilled, enculturated, and controlled through a multitude of wide-reaching governmental programs. Programs, such as public education, in which I hold heartfelt and deep respect, but programs without rational grounding. Rationality has cast down the universal morals, toppling them as axiomatic dogmas without grounding in the type of scientific evidence generally held to be necessary to claim a model holds impartial truth. In their place, we have enshrined common goals of public goals, seeking to anchor our failing ethic to telos, or goals/purposes.

The problem with this is twofold. Pragmatically, it is certainly open to argument how effective these programs are at their stated goals. With widespread dissent as to what the public good is, and how schools, welfare, market regulation, and government itself ought promote it, placing an ethic upon a notion of public goals seems to doom it to be a meager ethic. Small in scope, hard fought between different factions, an ethic of the nasty, brutish, and short sighted.

More fundamentally, one runs against the impenetrable bedrock of axiomatic assumption. Aside from our say so, what makes public good, good? To rephrase the question, if I want to be a misanthrope, why ought I not be? If I want to take my plastic grocery bags out an use them to asphyxiate horned owls, why ought I not, is it not, "[our] planet to kill"? (The quote comes from the comment thread on a blog post of my sister's)

This is another reason I have a deep distrust for large scale entities, be they governmental, economic, political, or activist. I do not believe we have sufficient normative energy, morality, left to fuel these endeavors harmoniously, perhaps we never did. If power corrupts, why do we continue to raise power structures that loom ever higher is our world like modern towers of Babel constructed from wealth, technology, and organization of people on unprecedented scales. At the same time our system of accountability crumbles to unlamented dust. If the divine right to rule spawned abuses, at least it provided a framework in which the ruler was to be held accountable. We are constructing a world where the rulers have no right to rule, only the naked fact that indeed they are ABLE to rule. A world where corporations are REQUIRED by law to circumvent laws if the expected cost of paying off the fine is less than that of coming into accordance with existing regulations. In short, a world where the systems of power are hardly held in check by a dysfunctional and dying morality.

I do not advocate a regression to the systems of morality which previously existed. Having heard the siren call of reason we can hardly stop up our ears and attempt to mandate a shared public morality through government religion, at least not if we wish to be taken seriously. The Pandora's box which we have opened contains too many blessings, medicine, technology, a glimpse at the terrifying beauty shining from a universe laid bare before the merciless manipulations of modern science, I do not believe that we could shut it, even if the majority could be convinced that it is necessary.

Rather, I urge us to turn toward the concrete, to the all encompassing web of human interrelations in which we find yourselves enmeshed. As I always have, I suggest that all notions of worldly value left for us to cling to in solidarity is the value of our fellow human flotsam in the maelstrom of modernity. Unfortunately, this moral too falls afoul of the axiomatic criterion. I can tell you why I believe shared humanity is important, why I feel it is the only thing of worth in the world, but I cannot logically derive why it should be important to you. Thus, in the end, all we are left is the moral darkness closing in around, an entropic demise of the ethical world long before the speculated mirror event in the physical realm. But if all is to be overcome by tides of chaos, is it not best that we go into the end, or whatever new beginning this may be, secure in the company of each other?

"Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

Singularity Redux

This is a response to a wonderful post on Elf Army Writes about the Singularity. I was going to leave it as a comment, but as I wrote it just kept on doubling in length until it seemed a bit unwieldy and better suited to be a post of its own. I highly encourage you to follow the link to the Singularity post, but let me try to summarize the contents.

Computing power doubles every 18 months to 2 years, this is often called Moore's Law. It is theorized that, at some point, computers will achieve the computational power of the human brain and begin self-improving, this event is called the Singularity. After this, futurists like Ray Kurzweil believe that we will be improved by the machines, or we will become machines. Dystopian story writers, of course, usually predict we will be subsumed, enslaved, or exterminated by the machines, but I digress. The method that, we predict, a computer would be able to implement these self-improving processes is called a genetic algorithm. A genetic algorithm is allowed to change, or mutate, itself and judges the "fitness" of the resulting program according to some cost structure.

Before we begin, some xkcd levity. Let me start with a pragmatic concern that I have with Kurzweil's work as I understand it. I only read a bit of Kurzweil for my Thinking Critically About Technology course, so I do not claim to be an expert. That said, it is my understanding that the Singularity is set to occur when the computing power of an artificial computer matches that of the human brain, where computing power is measured in the ability of a processor to perform a certain number of operations in a given time. This seems to sidestep the dual problems of architecture and software.

Architecture refers to the structure of the processor performing the calculations. Computers tend to be linear processors, although nowadays most home computers have two processors working together, each tends to do its own thing, so one will keep your game running while the other makes sure your music is playing from a separate program. In contrast, the human brain is massively parallel. Despite common aphorisms, it is not terribly difficult to walk and chew gum at the same time, and you are also breathing, regulating your circulatory system, probably thinking about something, and so forth. Not only are we able to run a truly massive number of processes simultaneously in our brain, the processes interact in our brains, for example, our mood subconsciously affects our mannerisms and demeanor. Suffice it to say that, even if a computer were to have the raw power of the human brain, it does not seem clear that it would be able to harness it to the same effect as a human brain. Writing software to take advantage of parallel processing requires a very different type of thinking than linear processing, and is still considered a tricky problem. Or, to put it a different way, any animal with a larger brain probably has more processing power available to it, but (I think) there is something unique that humans do with their processing power which cannot be explained without an appeal to a biological analogue of software.

Of course I could be wrong, and certainly wouldn't mind finding out that I am, and the Singularity could come right on schedule. I hope it does; it seems like the experience of collaborating with an intelligence that was not human could open up vast insights into ourselves and our place in the world. I like to believe that, if we could communicate with something that had a vastly different perspective, we would obtain a better all around view of our own existence.

As you may have noticed, after the Singularity the interesting questions, to me, become less technical and more philosophical, along the lines of what does it mean to be a person? Before I burnt out Fall semester, I wrote a three part series on the philosophy of consciousness, which is quite relevant to this topic if you are interested. I also recommend the Science Fiction novel Blindsight by Peter Watts; although rather bleak, it deals with the issue of consciousness in a compelling and thought provoking manner.

I would like to conclude with the subject of computers having feelings. The problem of other minds, which I mentioned in my post about the song Poker Face, implies that we don't even know that other humans have feelings, only that they tend to act in a manner that is consistent with how we act when we experience feelings. So, it would not be necessary for a computer to actually experience emotions for us to believe they have feelings, merely that they respond in a manner consistent with our expectations of emotional beings.

This brings me to the terrifying thought with which I closed my second post in the series on consciousness. It seems feasible that we could create computers that mimicked the responses to emotions, but did not actually experience emotions. If we were to replace ourselves with such computer replicas, we would destroy all beauty by forever blinding the eyes of the beholders.

Facebook

A while ago, I noticed that the population of my Facebook friends list was approaching 500. Since 500 is a rather nice, round number in base 10, the thought occurred to me that it might be a grand thing to reach that number. However, as those of you who follow my every move on Facebook, don't I have an inflated notion of my own importance, might know, since the new calendar year I have shed a large amount of my friends list, it is a fair question to inquire what precipitated this alteration in priority.

Part of the explanation lies in the sense of alienation that I experience, to a greater or lesser sense, each time I return to Michigan. If my existence is often characterized by a deep sense of loneliness, then an overstocked friends list is, at best, a cruelly ironic joke, and at worst an attempt at self-deception. Paring my list down to include a higher concentration of people with whom I actually feel a social connection, whether only on Facebook for the most part or also in real life activities, allows me greater social satisfaction from my Facebook account. It is replicating socially what one does nutritionally when one cuts empty calories out of one's diet, except in this metaphor empty calories don't actually taste very good, once one realizes that the superficial satisfaction of appearing "popular" does not translate into the more substantive enjoyment of feeling "well liked."

The other satisfaction I obtained from the exercise was the enjoyment of better ordering my affairs. This is the same satisfaction I get when I utilize vacation time to assign my students grades or to straighten up my personal E-mail account. On a related note, during the vacation I spent an afternoon curled up on a friend's couch, in Oregon, working out what grades students had earned the past semester, that was a very fulfilling afternoon.

I suppose that if you are reading this, the odds of you being one of the people I removed from my friends list are rather slim, but I felt like explaining why it is that I did what I did, and may continue to do.

A Call to Grandma

Of course, those of you who know me, or just the way my mind works, must already suspect that this shall not just be about a call to my Grandmother. However, that is the departing point for this train of thought. About a week ago, I used G-mail phone to call my Grandmother's land line, for free! We chatted about my life, and her life, my weather, her weather, and hopes to see each other come next Christmas. When I hung up, I thought it would make a good Facebook status to write, "I just called my Grandma, for free!"

However, that seemed to imply that talking with Grandma was only worthwhile if it could be done for free, which is not the case at all, and I thought that I should explain. When I was a wee lad, our family had this arcane thing called a "long distance plan." To this day I do not understand all the nuances of "long distance plans," but suffice it to say they allowed landlines to call other landlines very far away, but they tended to cost a decent amount of money, and they charged per minute, so long calls to Grandma were expensive, although long calls from Grandma were not for some reason.

Fortunately cell phones came on the scene and long distance became much simpler. In fact, nowadays you can call pretty much anywhere in the US at the same rate, I think. I still don't quite know what that rate is, my ignorance to "long distance plans" translated naturally into an ignorance of telephone plans in general. This is ok though, because my sister is the only member of my immediate family who has successfully made the jump to the cell phone era. I own, and leave on my bedroom floor most of the time, a rather utilitarian cell phone for which I purchase "minutes." I understand what "minutes," are, they are simpler than a plan, and I can use these "minutes" to make or receive calls (or "texts" which I still don't understand and cannot make). The point is that, as usual, calling my Grandmother would be an expense, though one made quite willingly, as I tend to posses more "minutes" than I am likely to need.

So, being able to call my Grandmother for free and spend as long talking to her as I wanted without any notion of any financial repercussions whatsoever broke a fundamental experience in my life dating back to childhood. It isn't that calling Grandma is not worth the expense, it is how foreign to my worldview it is that there is no expense. Which got me thinking about social perceptions of what can be monetized.

For so long my calls to Grandma existed in this world of financial transactions. I give a certain amount of money and receive a specific amount of time to chat with Grandma. But now I can talk with Grandma for free, something I would imagine phone companies are not terribly pleased with. If we continue to have the ability to speak with people throughout the nation for free, I would imagine we will come to expect this ability, developing a sense of entitlement.

While the term is often used in a negative context, I do not believe that entitlement is inherrently bad. As long as we generalize from a selfish personal entitlement, "I ought to have," to a more public sense of entitlement, "we ought to have," I think entitlement is a valuable check against profiteering from basic human necessities. For example, in this nation, there is a widespread, if not uniform, feeling of public entitlement toward things like childhood education, clean water supplies, and certain rights or freedoms. We would be outraged if someone were to tell us that the right to criticize the government cost $50 for a five minute block! We may have to pay if we wish to communicate through a specific medium, radio or television for example, but we are entitled to the right to communicate against the government.

Of course, companies that sell things, such as "long distance plans," do not, in general, look favorably upon widespread feelings of entitlement to the services that they would much rather provide in exchange for money. In fact, sometimes companies attempt to control and market resources previously considered public entitlements, which is one form of privatization. While I am not saying that privatization is uniformly bad, it does take a service out of the realm of "of the people, by the people, and for the people," into the realm of "of the shareholders, by the corporate bureaucracy, for the profit."

Suppose a corporation patented a new method of transporting fresh air from one location to another. They might then attempt to charge the beneficiaries at the destination for the imported fresh air they were breathing. It would not make a difference whether you sought out the imported fresh air or were content with the classic model of air, because air intermixes so freely, undoubtedly you would be consuming the companies patented air, and they would want to charge you for the service. At this point, hopefully, your sense of entitlement is evoking in you a moral outrage that a corporation, let us call it Nomsanto, would introduce a product that was so invasive that it would displace our public entitlement to breathing air. You might even picture the poor citizens who steadfastly refused to pay Nomsanto buying breathing masks and oxygen tanks just so they could be sure they would not consume the precious, patented fresh air.

If we are outraged at Nomsanto's violation of public entitlement to fresh air, ought we not be similarly outraged at the repeated indications that a similarly named company, Monsanto, seems to be attempting to patent entire crops. While I have no problem with Genetically Engineered (GE) foods in general, when a company allegedly goes so far as to sue farmers for patent infringement if patented seed strains appear in their fields due to cross pollination, I think that we should all pay very close attention to the actions of said company. How is this essentially different than being charged for air when "private" air becomes mixed into the public air supply?

One could take this point as a motivation to discuss whether we ought to allow life to be privatized, seeing as it leads to such thorny issues with dire implications for public good. However, I think we have said quite enough for now, especially for a topic that started with a nice call to Grandma. Up to the previous paragraph, this was the thought process that considering posting about my call on Facebook started, I kid you not.

Old Gamers Never Die

They just blow on their cartridges a lot. I have to admit that I never was a hardcore gamer, but I was a fairly serious recreational gamer (and have the Mario Kart 64 skills to prove it). I also did die quite often, though it was great fun. However, I left that lifestyle behind me, for the most part, when I was at my undergrad; perhaps not so much due to my diligent studies (unless you happen to be one of my parents), but more because of the many opportunities to engage in fun activities with my peer group. This is of course how I gained my crazy boardgame addiction.

Here in Michigan, where the boardgames do not roam as freely, I occasionally find myself with an abundance of time. In light of this I am returning to my roots and, once again, hoisting the controller aloft, this time to a new generation of games. This post is to say, I am not impressed.

While graphics have improved with the time, the essence of the game has, in a word, atrophied. I would separate the games I have played into two broad categories. One includes games with wonderful gameplay but no overarching story, or at best a weak facsimile thereof. While enjoyable, keep in mind that they are competing with MS Hearts. The other is characterized by a deep, even enthralling, plot line, which tragically is supplemented with an actual game that is indifferent at best.

Into this category I place Mass Effect and FF XIII, although they are engrossing to watch, and I intend to finish them at least once, I am somewhat dismayed at the lackluster game beneath the lovely story. As a DM, I believe that my appreciation for background information ranks up there with two year olds and people who have actually read the Silmarillion, but when I buy a game I hope to feel like I am playing something. Honestly, FF XIII comes on three CD's, if I had that kind of time I would read the Silmarillion. While in Mass Effect I at least get the feeling that I am making decisions and entering a role, in FF XIII I feel like I am watching a stunningly gorgeous and stunningly long movie.

Perhaps I am being too harsh on these games. The measure by which I judge them has been set by Chrono Trigger, FF III (6), Earthbound, and Secret of Mana, which may be an unbeatable standard. Even if we cannot exceed the games of our ancestors, I would ask that we at least produce games of a similar quality, worthy heirs to the legacy.

In other news, I think that, in addition to my Friday philosophical post, I shall try to put up a post, or even two, midweek on a lighter note. So all my friends out there see how absolutely glamorous my life is.

Love Sucks

After entertaining the idea for a while, I finally decided to make the commitment and try to develop a lasting relationship. At first it was wonderful, I was able to get to know my partner better, which caused me to change and learn about myself. However, after some time we began to experience some communications issues. What used to be a free and open interchange of information has become slow; often I give up in frustration before getting a reply. I have started seeing my last partner because there the communication is so much better.

Of course, I am referring to my choice to use Firefox this year. As much as I love Firefox, and as sexy as the tabs are, I know something is wrong between us. Perhaps it is my Microsoft operating system savaging Firefox out of spite, but for some reasons often times a simple request at Blogger or Facebook will cause Firefox to stop responding for minutes on end. Speaking of the end, that is where my wits are. I have been returning to the undeniably evil, but more convenient, Microsoft Internet Explorer. What else can I do when my other browser is comatose?

Perhaps my computing habits need to change, or perhaps I will return to whence I came. I will miss the tabs though, which is ironic considering they are one of the negative features I listed about Firefox in the first place. This illustrates a frustrating component of my personality, I am really quite an adaptable person but I just lack motivation to change too often. See, I did learn about myself in this relationship. Here's hoping that Firefox and I pull through and can celebrate many more successful Google searches.

P.S. I remembered how to log in this time, go me!