Author: cgerrish

Unemployed philosopher

As Machines May Think…

Published July 15, 2010 by cgerrish

As we consider machines that may think, we turn toward our own desires. We’d like a machine that understands what we mean, even what we intend, rather than what we strictly say. We don’t want to have to spell everything out. We’d like the machine to take a vague suggestion, figure out how to carry on, and then return to us with the best set of options to choose from. Or even better, the machine should carry out our orders and not bother us with little ambiguities or inconsistencies along the way. It should work all those things out by itself.

We might look to Shakespeare and The Tempest for a model of this type of relationship. Prospero commands the spirit Ariel to fulfill his wishes; and the sprite cheerfully complies:

ARIEL
Before you can say ‘come’ and ‘go,’
And breathe twice and cry ‘so, so,’
Each one, tripping on his toe,
Will be here with mop and mow.
Do you love me, master? no?

But The Tempest also supplies us with a counter-example in the character Caliban, who curses his servitude and his very existence:

CALIBAN
You taught me language; and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!

Harold Bloom, in his essay on The Tempest in Shakespeare: Invention of the Human, connects the character of Prospero with Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. Faustus also had a spirit who would do his bidding, but the cost to the good doctor, was significant.

For the most part we no longer look to the spirit world for entities to do our bidding. We now place our hopes for a perfect servant in the realm of the machine. Of course, machines already do a lot for us. But frankly, for a long time now, we’ve thought that they could be a little more intelligent. Artificial intelligence, machines that think, the global brain: we’re clearly under the impression that our lot could be improved by such an advancement in technology. Here we aren’t merely thinking of an augmentation of human capability in the mode of Doug Engelbart, but rather something that stands on its own two feet.

In 2002, David Gelernter wrote a book called The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought. Gelernter explored the spectrum of human thought from tightly-focused task-driven thought to poetic and dream thoughts. He makes the case that we need both modes, the whole spectrum, to think like a human does. Recently, Gelernter updated his theme in an essay for Edge.org called Dream-Logic, The Internet and Artificial Thought. He returns to the theme that most of the advocates for artificial intelligence have a defective understanding of what makes up human thought:

Many people believe that the thinker and the thought are separate. For many people, “thinking” means (in effect) viewing a stream of thoughts as if it were a PowerPoint presentation: the thinker watches the stream of his thoughts. This idea is important to artificial intelligence and the computationalist view of the mind. If the thinker and his thought-stream are separate, we can replace the human thinker by a computer thinker without stopping the show. The man tiptoes out of the theater. The computer slips into the empty seat. The PowerPoint presentation continues.

But when a person is dreaming, hallucinating — when he is inside a mind-made fantasy landscape — the thinker and his thought-stream
are not separate. They are blended together. The thinker inhabits his thoughts. No computer will be able to think like a man unless it, too, can inhabit its thoughts; can disappear into its own mind.

Gelernter makes the case that thinking must include the whole spectrum of the thought. He extends this idea of the thinker inhabiting his thoughts by saying that when we make memories, we create alternate realities:

Each remembered experience is, potentially, an alternate reality. Remembering such experiences in the ordinary sense — remembering “the beach last summer” — means, in effect, to inspect the memory from outside. But there is another kind of remembering too: sometimes remembering “the beach last summer” means re-entering the experience, re-experiencing the beach last summer: seeing the water, hearing the waves, feeling the sunlight and sand; making real the potential reality trapped in the memory.

(An analogy: we store potential energy in an object by moving it upwards against gravity. We store potential reality in our minds by creating a memory.)

Just as thinking works differently at the top and bottom of the cognitive spectrum, remembering works differently too. At the high-focus end, remembering means ordinary remembering; “recalling” the beach. At the low-focus end, remembering means re-experiencing the beach. (We can re-experience a memory on purpose, in a limited way: you can imagine the look and fragrance of a red rose. But when focus is low, you have no choice. When you remember something, you must re-experience it.)

On the other side of the ledger, you have the arguments for a technological singularity via recursive self-improvement. One day, a machine is created that is more adept at creating machines than we are. And more importantly, it’s a machine who’s children will exceed the capabilities of the parent. Press fast forward and there’s an exponential growth in machine capability that eventually far outstrips a human’s ability to evolve.

In 2007, Gelernter and Kurzweil debated the point:

When Gelernter brings up the issue of emotions, poetic thought and the re-experiencing of memory as fundamental constituents of human thought, I can’t help but think of the body of the machine. Experience needs a location, a there for its being. Artificial intelligence needs an artificial body. To advance even a step in the direction of artificial intelligence, you have to endorse the mind/body split and think of these elements as replaceable, extensible, and to some extent, arbitrary components. This move begs a number of questions. Would a single artificial intelligence be created or would many versions emerge? Would natural selection cull the herd? Would an artificial intelligence be contained by the body of the machine in which it existed? Would each machine body contain a unique artificial intelligence with memories and emotions that were solely its own? The robot and the android are the machines we think of as having bodies. In Forbidden Planet, the science fiction update of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, we see the sprite Ariel replaced with Robby the Robot.

In Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the HAL 9000 was an artificial intelligence who’s body was an entire space ship. HAL was programmed to put the mission above all else, which violated Asimov’s three laws of robotics. HAL is a classic example of an artificial intelligence that we believe has gone a step too far. A machine who has crossed a line.

When we desire to create machines that think; we want to create humans who are not fully human. Thoughts that don’t entirely think. Intelligence that isn’t fully intelligent. We want to use certain words to describe our desires, but the words express so much more than we intend. We need to hold some meaning back, the spark that makes humans, thought and intelligence what they are.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

Clearly some filters, algorithms and agents will be better than others, but none of them will think, none will have intelligence. If part of thinking is the ability to make new analogies, then we need to think about what we do when we create and use these software machines. It becomes an easier task when we start our thinking with augmentation rather than a separate individual intelligence.

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Banks, Walled Gardens And Metaphors of Place

Published July 13, 2010 by cgerrish

It’s interesting to think of banks as walled gardens. For example, on the Network, we might call Facebook, or aspects of Apple or Microsoft, a walled garden. The original America Online was the classic example. While most of us prefer to have walls, of some sort, around our gardens; the term is generally used to criticize a company for denying users open access, a lack of data portability and for censorship (pulling weeds). However when we consider our finances, we prefer there be a secure wall and a strong hand in the cultivation and tending of the garden. Context is everything.

More generally, a walled garden refers to a closed or exclusive set of information services provided for users. This is in contrast to providing consumers open access to the applications and content.

The recent financial crisis has presented what appears to be an opportunity to attack the market share of the big banks. Trust in these institutions is lower than normal and the very thing that made them appealing, their size, is now a questionable asset. The bigness of a bank in some ways describes the size of their private Network. On the consumer side, it’s their physical footprint with branches, or stores as some like to call them, and the extension of that footprint through their proprietary ATM network plus affiliated ATM networks. On the institutional side, there’s a matching infrastructure that represents the arteries, veins and capillaries that circulate money and abstractions of money around the country. Network is the medium of distribution. Once the platform of a big bank’s private network is in place, they endeavor to deliver the widest possible variety of product and services through these pipes. Citibank led the way in the financial supermarket space, now all the major players describe themselves as diversified financial services firms.

Every so often, in the life of the Network, the question of centralized versus distributed financial services comes up. Rather than buying a bundle of services from a single financial services supermarket, we wonder whether it’s possible to assemble best of breed services through a single online front-end. This envisions financial services firms providing complete APIs to aggregators so they can provide more friendly user interfaces and better analytics. Intuit/Mint has been the most successful with this model. It’s interesting to note that since the financial supermarkets are generally built through acquisition, under the covers, their infrastructures and systems of record are completely incompatible. So while the sales materials tout synergy, the funds to actually integrate systems go begging. The financial services supermarket in practice is aggregated, not integrated.

We’re starting to see the community banks and credit unions get more aggressive in their advertising— using a variation on the “small is beautiful” theme. For consumers, the difference in products, services and reach has started to narrow. By leveraging the Network, the small financial institution can be both small and big at the same time. In pre-Network history, being simultaneously small and big violated the laws of physics. In the era of the Network, any two points on the planet can be connected in near real time as long as Network infrastructure is present. An individual can have an international footprint. Of course, being both big and big allows a financial institution to take larger risks because, theoretically at least, it can absorb larger loses. We may see legislation from Congress that collars risk and puts limitations on the unlimited relationship between size and risk.

The Network seems to continually present opportunities for disintermediation of the dominant players in the financial services industry. Ten years ago, account aggregation via the Network seemed to be on the verge. But the model was never able to overcome its usability problems, which at bottom are really internet identity problems. We’re beginning to see a new wave of companies sprouting up to test whether a virtual distribution network through the internet can supplant the private physical networks of the established players. SmartyPig, Square and BankSimple present different takes on disintermediating the standard way we route and hold the bits that represent our money.

Once any Network endpoint can be transformed into a secure transaction environment, the advantage of the private network will have been largely neutralized. And while it hasn’t solved account aggregation’s internet identity problem yet, the mobile network device (some call it a telephone) has significantly changed the identity and network landscape. The walls around the garden represent security and engender trust. The traditional architecture of bank buildings reflect this concept. But the walled garden metaphor is built on top of the idea of carving out a private enclave from physical space. The latest round of disintermediation posits the idea that there’s a business in creating ad hoc secure transaction connections between any two Network endpoints. In this model, security and trust are earned by guaranteeing the transaction wherever it occurs.

There have always been alternative economies, transactions that occur outside of the walled gardens. In the world of leading-edge technology, we tend to look for disruption to break out in the rarefied enclaves of the early adopter. But when the margins of the urban environment grow larger than the traditional center, there’s a good chance that it’s in the improvisational economies of the favelas, shanty towns and slums that these new disruptive financial services will take root.

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Fashion: A Remix Economy

Published June 25, 2010 by cgerrish

Listening to Russ Roberts of EconTalk discuss his wardrobe and his relative cluelessness with regard to fashion, my thoughts turned to software engineers. I wondered if both economists and software engineers believe that there’s some kind of optimization algorithm for selecting clothing.

In an episode of EconTalk, Johanna Blakely talks with Roberts about how the lack of copyright protection in the fashion industry turns it into an economy of continuous innovation. There are some interesting lessons here regarding the relationship between originals and copies, remixing and the circulation of design motifs.

Download EconTalk: Johanna Blakely on Fashion and IP

Somehow it seems unlikely that the technology/media business will look to fashion as an inspiration for viable business models. But it’s clear they could learn a thing or two. As you look across the landscape of technology companies, only Apple (despite the fact that Jony Ive never changes his T-shirt), has managed to create a release cycle that in many ways mirrors the major fashion houses. They release new designs annually and then watch the knock-off shops go to work trying to replicate their products. And like the top fashion houses, Apple is driven to be creative, to set the next trend that puts them one step ahead.

The fashion world still honors and rewards the creators of fresh and original looks. Since there’s no regulatory friction hindering fast followers with good-enough copies, the market is filled with cheap knock-offs. Both seem to survive in the ecosystem. One reason for this is that the copies are not digital— they aren’t exact atom-for-atom copies of the originals. Generally, to lower the price of the knock-off, the materials have to be cheaper. In the world of bits, exact replication is just a matter of a few key strokes. There’s no such thing as cheaper or more expensive bits. One of the more interesting trends in fashion is the designer who copies herself. Rather than cede the low-end knock-off market, the designer executes low-end copies of her signature styles for mass distribution through the fast-fashion retailers.

You can learn a lot about the economics of the technology business by simply viewing each of the major vendors as a fashion house.

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The Stuff Dreams Are Made On…

Published June 24, 2010 by cgerrish

We’re inaugurating a new tradition around the homestead, Shakespeare Saturdays. This Saturday we’ll be screening Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest. In the story, the magician Prospero, and his daughter Miranda, have been stranded on an island for 12 years. Prospero raises a tempest on the sea to cause a passing ship to run aground. Among the passengers are Prospero’s rivals from the time before the island, Antonio and Alonso, King of Naples. It’s in the midst of this wild storm the story begins…

Written in 1610, the play continues to be regularly performed and adapted. The Tempest has also been the inspiration for whole range of work from operas and symphonies to poetry and post-colonial literary analysis. Quotes from the play turn up in the most unexpected places.

Samuel Beckett’s Endgame has the character Hamm speaking a line from one of Prospero’s most memorable speeches: “Our revels now are ended.”

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And—like the baseless fabric of this vision —
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. …”

Prospero
The Tempest by William Shakespeare

John Gielgud called Prospero his favorite role. He played it many times in the theater, but he was never able to mount a film version of the project. The closest he came was in Peter Greenaway’s adaptation Prospero’s Books.

Caliban is another fascinating character— a beast, a brute, the son of Sycorax, a witch who was also banished to the island, but has died several years before the action of the play begins. Caliban provides the counterpoint to Prospero, where Prospero sees that he must wake from the dream he’s created; Caliban suffers so thoroughly in his daily existence that he cries out to dream again.

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.

Caliban
The Tempest by William Shakespeare

There are 38 of Shakespeare’s plays and collaborations in existence and there are film versions of most of them. Not every Saturday will be Shakespeare Saturday, but I’m looking forward to immersing myself in a very foreign world that is not so unlike our own.

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