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Category: time

A Hundred Monkeys of Doom

Published May 26, 2014 by cgerrish

There's the old story of a hundred monkeys randomly typing on a hundred typewriters eventually, over time, producing the works of Shakespeare. The point of this story is that once written, Shakespeare's plays and poetry are a fixed sequence of letters. If a hundred monkeys type random character sequences over thousands of years, eventually they'll produce a match to the Shakespeare sequence.

Of course, if Shakespeare had never lived or written his work, it's possible the monkeys would have still produced the Shakespeare sequence simply by virtue of the fact that all sequences are eventually be produced. On another level, this story is an attack on the artist. The work of the author is just an ordering of glyphs into a sequence that results in a pleasurable decoding experience for humans. Obviously a machine could be built to randomly produce these letter sequences, and then filter out the ones that have the qualities humans appreciate as they decode them. Computing power is verging on the capability to replace human creativity across the board through sheer brute force.

Software engineers often joke about the career potential of liberal arts majors. Something about “do you want fries with that.” But what's lost on them is that Shakespeare's works, reduced to a sequence of letters, is just some fixed sequence of letters. It has little to do with Shakespeare's particular genius. The complex software written by coders could just as easily be the subject of the story. Given enough time, a hundred monkeys at a hundred typewriters could produce the Unix operating system, Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop. In fact, unlike the works of Shakespeare, it would be much simpler to determine whether randomly generated software code was usable and useful.

Venture capitalists might be better served by investing in these random software generators than in human software engineers. Company founders can be royal pains. Over time the system would generate software that generated random software using commodity computing hardware. The need for engineers would be completely eliminated.

To put a darker cast on the story, a hundred monkeys at a hundred network-connected Unix command lines could generate spam, worms and viruses that would disable the entire network of networks. Even the tightest firewalls and security systems could be breached using this monkey-powered random brute force attack. No security system is perfect, they all have holes that are invisible until an unexpected exploit occurs.

When we say “over some period of time” we usually mean some far off future that none of us will experience. It could take thousands, even millions of years. Of course, the nature of randomness means that, very possibly, it could be the next roll of the dice that seals our fate.

 

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I Like to iWatch

Published May 1, 2014 by cgerrish

For some reason we're looking for a computerized wrist watch. I guess it's because everyone, at least before smart phones, used to buy a watch. The market for wrist watches appears to include just about everyone, but good quality watches are rarely replaced. It's becoming a niche market steeped in nostalgia.

A watch is for telling time. A computer isn't necessary for that function. No one needs an iWatch to tell time. The current networked wearables are small feature-reduced smart phones that can be strapped to the wrist. Not that phones are still telephones.

The etymology of the word “watch” isn't entirely clear, but it seems to have something to do with a schedule for keeping watch, for instance on the deck of ship. An iWatch would be a device for keeping an eye on the wearer. The schedule can be discarded because it's always on, although the batteries need to be recharged now and then. “Wearable” means attached via a strap or some other means–it's a device not meant for the hand or the pocket.

These new devices, if they actually appear, are personal data collection devices that will send information for analysis to a personal or feudal cloud. The devices themselves will have limited read-out capability. They are sensors. They're meant to suck in data, not to display it. And once it's “in,” there's little chance it will remain private.

 

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The Far-ness of Distance

Published February 24, 2014 by cgerrish

The annihilation of distance is one of the hallmarks of modernity. To contradict Kipling, the twain of East and West have not only met, they Skype regularly. When distance was filled with far-ness and strangeness, we feared and shunned it when it came too close. The river, the port and the railroad moved both the rare and the strange from beyond the horizon into our locality.

Radio and television brought sound and pictures of the strangeness of distance into our living room. The Network first brought distance to our desktop and then to the devices in our pockets. Distance stripped of its far-ness. The upside is that strange seems less strange; our horizons are expanded. The downside is that nothing surprises. We've seen it all, or it's only a screen and a click away.

Joseph Banks's voyage on the Endeavor lasted three years. Charles Darwin spent five years on the Beagle traversing the oceans. From their perspective, all kinds of strangeness was discovered. Those kinds of time scales aren't in play in exploring the earth any more. It's only space exploration where we accept big time scales and the far-ness of distance.

But it isn't the clicks on the map or the tick-tock of the clock that make up distance. Time and space emanate from objects, they are part of what happens when things interact. We tend to measure time and space as some calculable number of units from where we are. We are, after all, the ones who measure. But it's the things themselves that tell us about their timing and spacing. As an aside, they tell each other too.

We take for granted that distance has been annihilated. But it's there, in the things whether they're near or far. Somehow we need to re-learn to see what we believe has been destroyed.

 

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Ten Observations Around 2013

Published December 29, 2013 by cgerrish

garden-angel

These observations are in no particular order and are obviously incomplete.

Big Data, Big Error and Certainty

The more we use big data to justify decisions, more certain we become. This is despite the fact that big data findings are expressed as probabilities. The more certain we become the more we open ourselves to big errors. The size of these errors and the size of our certainty will be roughly equivalent.

Networked Social Streams are just Television

What looked like a new medium turns out to be an evolution of television. The large social and search hubs have taken the place of the Networks. The business model of sponsored commercial messages in the stream remains roughly the same.  The major innovation is that now when you talk back to the television, more people have the potential to hear you.

Recommenders: Rough propriety vs. Optimization

The robot that can find you the stuff you’ll like isn’t doing a very good job. The algorithm “if you like this tea, you’ll also like this weak tea” is flawed except for people who happen to be drinking weak tea. More precision isn’t what’s called for. The trick will be in finding what’s roughly appropriate rather than the perfect match. In this melody it’s the wrong notes that will prove most important.

Real time is Dead

Real time media (with the exception of financial data for the purpose of trading) is the equivalent of turning on the television to see what’s on. There’s always something on, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to watch it. The flood of real-time personal digital information will be consumed and digested by equally large robots who will determine that nothing important is going on. It will turn out to be sound and fury signifying nothing. Now we can be certain that nothing’s happening. This will free up a lot of time.

The Technical Age is Inside of the Ecological Age

Humankind is constitutive of the biosphere, meaning that it is a part of a larger thing. While global warming is down to human activity within the biosphere, the biosphere isn’t something to which we can apply our human will and mold like a piece of plastic. The technical in us has the fantasy that we can “fix” the problem of the warming earth through optimizing our technical approaches. This is the faith of the scientist and the capitalist.

Plausible Deniability and the “You” who is Recorded

The poor will be recorded and prosecuted based on those recordings. The rich will purchase plausible deniability with regard to their recordings and nullify their value in courtrooms.

Silicon Valley has Over-Served the Consumer

With few exceptions, all new technology products and services will be considered superfluous. This will be the case for the next 15 to 20 years. Google Glass will prove to be indigestible. It will find a place in warfare and professional technical work situations. Pundits will keep looking for, and demanding, the next big innovation when we haven’t fully digested the last one. We barely understand the telephone and television yet.

The Enterprise was Already Social

There are many experts who will say that the Enterprise isn’t social until they say it is. Corporate enterprises are social by their nature, some new communications tools are added to the toolbox every year. This has always been true. Social in the enterprise will end up looking more like UseNet and Listservs. Real-time streams are for coffee breaks.

The Singularity and the Fear of Being Left Out

The singularity is the most important and telling fantasy of the technical age. Its practical possibility is unimportant. Those who desire and worship the singularity feel they will be included in this grand reunion of all things. They see themselves helping to build a paradise to replace the one we lost. Those who see it as dystopian exercise recognize that a machine-driven singularity may well exclude humans as too inefficient. The fallen human will have no place in the next level of evolution in which self-aware machines will dominate.

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