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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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Real-Time Networks, Man-In-The-Middle, And The Misappropriation Of ‘Hot News’

Published June 23, 2010 by cgerrish

Google and Twitter have filed a amicus brief with the appeals court on TheFlyOnTheWall.com case. Briefly, at issue is FlyOnTheWall’s near real-time redistribution of investment bank research ratings. Investment bank research departments spend time, money and resources creating stock ratings and price targets. The purpose of this effort is to create an information asymmetry in the market to the advantage of the i-bank’s clients. FlyOnTheWall does not employ analysts and has no research capability, it discovers stock ratings, aggregates and redistributes them in near real time. Since their cost of production only includes real-time redistribution infrastructure, and therefore they can offer their high-value information feeds at a lower cost than investment banks. Subscribers to FlyOnTheWall pay for these aggregated news feeds, they aren’t free. In their testimony, FlyOnTheWall claimed they only gathered information from publicly available sources and only published tweet-sized snippets summarizing the reports.

Google and Twitter make the following argument in their brief:

News reporting always has been a complex ecosystem, where what is ‘news’ is often driven by certain influential news organizations, with others republishing or broadcasting those facts — all to the benefit of the public,

and further

How, for example, would a court pick a time period during which facts about the recent Times Square bombing attempt would be non-reportable by others?”

At issue is the re-emergence of the hot news doctrine, which was originally put in place in 1918 to stop William Randolf Hearst’s International News Service from taking Associated Press wire news stories and redistributing them as their own. The court set forth five criteria to determine whether ‘hot news’ has been misappropriated:

(i) a plaintiff generates or gathers information at a cost;

(ii) the information is time-sensitive;

(iii) a defendant’s use of the information constitutes free riding on the plaintiff’s efforts;

(iv) the defendant is in direct competition with a product or service offered by the plaintiffs;

(v) the ability of other parties to free-ride on the efforts of the plaintiff or others would so reduce the incentive to produce the product or service that its existence or quality would be substantially threatened.

In the case of TheFlyOnTheWall.com the court ruled for the plaintiffs, Barclays, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, and decided that a 2 hour embargo was a reasonable amount of latency to build into the Network. In the fast-paced world of equity trading, two hours is an eternity. These days trades are often executed in a matter of milliseconds. The enforcement of this kind of rule, however, is problematic. In the brave new world of social media, both individuals and news organizations have interconnected real-time distribution networks. Once bits of information touch this public social network they can spread with breathtaking speed. Twitter, Google and Facebook are currently the media through which this information is dispersed. And each of them can be said to profit by the circulation of high-value information through their networks.

Over the last few days we’ve seen the drama of General Stanley A. McChrystal play out. The events were put into play by a story written by Michael Hastings, a freelancer for Rolling Stone Magazine. The story about McChrystal’s comments began leaking out Monday night. Both Politico and Time magazine posted a PDF of the Rolling Stone article to their web sites before Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone asked the sites to remove the PDF. The New York Times reports:

Will Dana, the magazine’s managing editor, said that the magazine did not always post articles online because it could make more money at the newsstand and that when it did, the articles were typically not posted until Wednesday. But other news organizations made that decision for him.

The McChrystal story is an interesting example of the ‘hot news’ doctrine. Rolling Stone magazine puts out 26 issues of its print magazine per year. Even before the issue hit the newsstands, it dominated cable news, has been fully reported in the New York Times and resulted in McChrystal’s resignation and replacement by General David Petraeus. One could argue that Rolling Stone should have a business model that allows them to benefit from these kind of real-time events. And it’s quite possible that the broad dissemination of this story will lead to a significant increase in newsstand sales and web site traffic.

In this case the ‘hot news’ was so hot that the story itself became a story. Major government policies regarding the conduct of the war in Afghanistan had to be decided in real time. There was no hesitation, no waiting for Rolling Stone’s newsstand business model to play out. By the time we finally see the printed magazine it will have become an artifact of history. With the advantage of hindsight, we may even wonder why the headline writer put McChrystal’s story third after Lady Gaga’s tell all and the final days of Dennis Hopper.

The question about the ‘hot news’ doctrine isn’t going away; and the decision of the appeals court will be closely watched. In the meanwhile, the marketplace is searching for a solution to the fact of real-time aggregation and relay of digitally-copied work product. The return of the pay wall is an attempt by producers of stories about the news to create a firewall around their work product. Most corporations employ a firewall to keep their valuable internal discussion from reaching the public networks. Limiting access of your product to paying customers isn’t a new idea. However, when your work product is a story about news events or ideas encoded in digital media, creating reliable access controls is problematic. Where in the early days of the Network the focus was on direct access and disintermediation of the middle man; now the economics favor the man-in-the-middle. Meta-data can be sold at a fraction of the price of the data to which it points. The complex ecosystem of ‘the news’ is looking for a new equilibrium in which both data and meta-data can flourish.

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Bloomsday, The Coffee House and The Network

Published June 16, 2010 by cgerrish

June 16th is known as Bloomsday; it’s the single day, in 1904, on which James Joyce’s novel Ulysses occurs. The day is commemorated around with the world with readings of the book and the hoisting of a pint or two.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

— Introibo ad altare Dei.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:

— Come up Kinch. Come up , you fearful jesuit.

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awakening mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking, gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the bowl smartly.

Joyce’s book brought to popular notice the idea of stream of consciousness literature. The term “stream of consciousness” was coined by the philosopher William James in an attempt to describe the mind-world connection as it relates the concept of truth. As a literary technique, it involves writing as a kind of transcription of the inner thought process of a character. In Ulysses, we find that stream rife with puns, allusions and parodies. Joyce was trying to capture another aspect of truth.

What challenged the reader of the day as avant garde and daring has become a relatively normal part of our network-connected lives.

Twitter has become a part of my daystream
– Roger Ebert

The stream of tweets flowing out of Twitter could aptly be described as a stream of collective consciousness. And so today, we think a great deal about various real-time streams and how they wend their way through networks of social connection. The water metaphors we use to speak about these things have roots in our shared history; they describe another kind of network of connections.

Stephen B. Johnson, in his book The Invention of Air, makes the case for the London Coffee House as an early prototype for the internet:

With the university system languishing amid archaic traditions, and corporate R&D labs still on the distant horizon, the public space of the coffeehouse served as the central hub of innovation in British society. How much of the Enlightenment do we owe to coffee? Most of the epic developments in England between 1650 and 1800 that still warrant a mention in the history textbooks have a coffeehouse lurking at some crucial juncture in their story. The restoration of Charles II, Newton’s theory of gravity, the South Sea Bubble— they all came about, in part, because England had developed a taste for coffee, and a fondness for the kind of informal networking and shoptalk that the coffeehouses enabled. Lloyd’s of London was once just Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse, until the shipowners and merchants started clustering there, and collectively invented the modern insurance company. …coffeehouse culture was cross-disciplinary by nature, the conversations freely roaming from electricity, to the abuses of Parliament, to the fate of dissenting churches.

But the coffeehouse as a nexus of debate was only half of the picture. Cultural practice at the time was to drink beer and wine, and maybe a little gin, at every opportunity. Water was not safe to drink, and so alcoholic alternatives were fondly embraced. The introduction of coffee and tea as popular beverages had a significant impact on the flow of valuable ideas. Again here’s Johnson:

The rise of coffeehouse culture influenced more than just the information networks of the Enlightenment; it also transformed the neurochemical networks in the brains of all those newfound coffee-drinkers. Coffee is a stimulant that has been clinically proven to improve cognitive function— particularly for memory related tasks— during the first cup or two. Increase the amount of “smart” drugs flowing through individual brains, and the collective intelligence of the culture will become smarter, if enough people get hooked.

In our day, the coffee house connected to a wifi network has been an accelerant to the businesses populating the Network. When Starbucks announced that they would be introducing free 1-click wifi in their stores, it reminded me of Stephen Johnson’s descriptions of the London coffeehouses. The coffeehouse provided a physical meeting place and the caffeine in the coffee provided a force multiplier for the ideas flowing through the people. There was a noticeable change in the rhythm of the age. By layering a virtual real-time social medium over a physical meeting place that serves legal stimulants, Starbucks replays a classic formula. Oddly, there’s a kind of collaborative energy that exists in the coffeehouse that has been completely expunged from the corporate workplace. Starbucks ups the ante by running a broadcast web service network through the connection. Here we see wifi emerging as the new backbone for narrowcasted television.

As we try to weave value-laden real-time message streams through the collaborative groupware surgically attached to the corporate balance sheet, we may do well to look back toward Bloomsday and also ask for a stream of unconsciousness. It’s in those empty moments between the times when we focus our attention that daydreams and poetic thought creep into the mix. Those “empty moments” are under attack as a kind of system latency. However it’s in those day dreams, poetic thoughts and napkin scribbles that we find the source of the non-linear jump. Without those moments in our waking life, we’re limited to only those things deemed “possible.”

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Apple’s UX Strategy: I Want To Hold Your Hand

Published June 15, 2010 by cgerrish

A few thoughts about the iPhone 4 and why technology does or doesn’t catch on. I’ve yet to hold one in my hand, but like everyone else I’ve got opinions. The typical gadget review takes the device’s feature list and compares using technical measures to other devices deemed competitive. Using this methodology, it would be fairly simple to dismiss the iPhone as introducing no new features. The other lines of attack involve dropped calls on the AT&T network and the App Store approval process. For some people these two items trump any feature or user experience.

Google talks about their mission as organizing the world’s information. When I think of Apple’s mission, at least their mission for the last five years or so, it revolves around getting closer to the user in real time. The technology they build flows from that principle.

I’d like to focus on just two new iPhone 4 features. The first is the new display, here’s John Gruber’s description:

It’s mentioned briefly in Apple’s promotional video about the design of the iPhone 4, but they’re using a new production process that effectively fuses the LCD and touchscreen — there is no longer any air between the two. One result of this is that the iPhone 4 should be impervious to this dust-under-the-glass issue. More importantly, though, is that it looks better. The effect is that the pixels appear to be painted on the surface of the phone; instead of looking at pixels under glass, it’s like looking at pixels on glass. Combined with the incredibly high pixel density, the overall effect is like “live print�.

The phrase that jumped out at me was “the pixels appear to be painted on the surface of the phone; instead of looking at pixels under glass.” While it seems like a small distance, a minor detail, it’s of the utmost importance. It’s the difference between touching something and touching the glass that stands in front of something. Putting the user physically in touch with the interaction surface is a major breakthrough in the emotional value of the user experience. Of course the engineering that made this kind of display is important, but it’s the design decision to get the device ever closer to the user that drove the creation of the technology. Touch creates an emotional relationship with the device, and that makes it more than just a telephone.

In a 2007 interview at the D5 conference, Steve Jobs said:

And, you know, I think of most things in life as either a Bob Dylan or a Beatles song, but there’s that one line in that one Beatles song, “you and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.

You could say that Apple’s strategy is encapsulated in the Beatles song: I Want To Hold Your Hand.

The lines that describe the feeling Jobs wants the iPhone and iPad to create are:

And when I touch you i feel happy, inside
It´s such a feeling
That my love
I can’t hide
I can’t hide
I can’t hide

The other new feature is FaceTime. Since the launch of the iPhone 3GS it’s been possible to shoot a video of something and then email it to someone, or post it to a network location that friends and family could access. Other phones had this same capability. That’s a real nice feature in an asynchronous sort of way. One of the problems with it is it has too many steps and it doesn’t work the way telephones work. Except when things are highly dysfunctional, we don’t send each other recorded audio messages to be retrieved later at a convenient time. We want to talk in real time. FaceTime allows talk + visuals in real time.

FaceTime uses phone numbers as the identity layer and works over WiFi with iPhone 4 devices only. That makes it perfectly clear under what circumstances these kind of video calls will work. Device model and kind of connectivity are only things a user needs to know. These constraints sound very limiting, but they dispel any ambiguity around the question of whether the user will be able to get video calls to work or not.

We often look to the network effect to explain the success of a product or a new platform. Has the product reached critical mass, where by virtue of its size and connectedness it continues to expand because new users gain immediate value from its scale. The network must absolutely be in place, but as we look at this window into our new virtual world, the question is: does the product put us in touch, in high definition, in real time? The more FaceTime calls that are made, the more FaceTime calls will be made. But the system will provide full value at the point when a few family members can talk to each other. Critical mass occurs at two.

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