Trivial Pursuits

I can't believe I wasted half a day of my rapid Wilkinson on this.

So I've just read The Age of Spiritual Machines, by Ray Kurzweil, and wow. It's always so weird watching someone very, very intelligent being completely wrong about everything. He could have gotten away with a lot more wrongness if he hadn't tried justifying his wrongness with more wrongness. The whole beginning of the book is all about how evolution is an "intelligent process" leading inexorably to a higher state of order and therefore to a species capable of creating technology. This complete misunderstanding of evolution doesn't really have anything to do with his point, but it certainly makes it harder to read. I had to keep throwing the book aside and yelling at it. Look, Ray, evolution does not have goals, much less intelligence. Humans are not the pinnacle of evolution, though horseshoe crabs might be. Technology use is a major evolutionary boon to a species (though consider all the drawbacks that go with it—long childhoods, large heads, higher rates of death in childbirth, etc., all of which must come into play before technology can exist) but then so is the ability to breathe fire, and that doesn't seem to be an inevitable result of evolution.

Anyway, I don't want to quibble about how wrong he is about his tangential arguments or we'll be here all day. The main thrust of his argument is that computers are growing exponentially more powerful (a trend which he claims predates and will outlast Moore's law) and that it's only a matter of time before computers are more intelligent than humans. But that's founded on the idea that human brains are just sufficiently advanced computers, which is, quite simply, balls. The world's fastest computer today peaks at around 2 × 10¹⁵ FLOPS (floating-point operations per second), and distributed computers are up to 8 × 10¹⁵—my conscious brain can manage about 1, tops, and that's only due to extensive use of memory caching. (When you ask me to add 7 + 6, my pattern recognition software recognizes that it's equivalent to 7 + 5 + 1, so my brain pulls the cached equations "7 + 5 = 12" and "12 + 1 = 13" from memory to solve the problem. It's actually more efficient than the method a computer would use, which only underlines how incredibly slow my brain is.) FLOPS, in short, are a completely meaningless measure of human brain power. We don't actually have a good measurement of brain power, besides the horrifically flawed but semi-useful concept of IQ, and in fact we haven't even got a good definitition of human intelligence. But it is obvious to me that the human brain is not like a computer, and I'm not even sure (and people smarter than me continue to debate) whether the brain is even a Turing machine—that is, whether the very notion of "computation" is even relevant to the brain. And the thing is, Kurzweil knows all this. He even addresses some of this. He just chooses to ignore it when it contradicts his theories.

There are a whole bunch of logical fallacies that Kurzweil uses that I don't even have names for. Like this one: "Technology α requires technologies β, γ and δ. If we have already discovered β and γ, then α is inevitable!" In other words: "Look, we've got plastic and blinky lights, right, so now all we need are a couple Heisenberg compensators and we'll have a transporter in every home!" Another fun example is when he puts forward the following (paraphrased): "Imagine a computer prints the phrase 'I'm bored; play with me' on the screen. Is that evidence of intelligence? What if instead of printing it to the screen, it says it aloud, using a synthesized voice? Is that intelligence? Taking it one step further, what if the computer was never programmed to say that phrase, but came up with it on its own? Is that intelligence?" My rephrasing of that would be: "Imagine a horse, capable of running about 25 miles per hour. Is that fast? Imagine now it was a thoroughbred horse, and could run at 30 miles per hour. Is that fast? Okay, let's take it one small step further: imagine that the horse was actually the starship Enterprise, capable of going warp 9.6..." (Well, I had fun with the first Star Trek metaphor, so I figured I'd run with it.)

I don't know, maybe eventually artificial neural networks will become more promising as computer-based models of the human brain. But that research isn't directly based on Moore's law (though it does depend on it in part—neural networks, in their current state, consume IMMENSE amounts of computer resources) and I see no evidence that it's accelerating exponentially. But that's the only computer technology currently on the table that I can see coming anywhere close to the human brain... eventually. And there are still a lot of unknowns there.

Anyway, the book is fundamentally a list of predictions, so let's look at some. First, let me just go over Kurzweil's earlier predictions for 1999—the year this book was written—which he takes to be almost 100% true. He uses the claim that he was right about all of his earlier predictions to justify his predictions for the 21^st century, so it's worth examining a few of them:

• "A computer will defeat the human chess champion around 1998." This is one of the better predictions he made, and unlike most of the others, it was based on actual data—he noted that computers were advancing up the chess rankings faster than humans, and plotted the convergence.
• The information economy will lead to "sustained economic growth and prosperity". Heh. Remember 1999, when people actually thought that?
• "A worldwide information network... will emerge." This would have been a fantastic prediction a few decades earlier, but in 1988, when the Internet was already widespread and the Web was only two years in the future, it's not so impressive.
• "The three technologies for a translating telephone... will each exist in sufficient quantity for a first generation system by the late 1990s." Hilarious. Don't you remember back in 1999 how great speaker-independent speech recognition and machine translation were? The scary thing is he actually thinks this came true.

He talks a lot about how awesome speech recognition software (which he sells, incidentally) and machine translation are, so just for fun, let's demonstrate that technology in 2009. I'll take one of my transcribed Google Voice voicemails and run it through Google Translate. The original message was, by my transliteration:
Hey, it's me, just calling to say hello. We're at San Francisco and getting ready to board in ten to fifteen minutes, heading home. Don't need to call back, obviously; my phone'll be off. Um, hope you had a good weekend, and hope everything's going well, and I'll catch up with you soon. Bye bye.
I took the Google Voice transcription of that, ran it through Google Translate into Spanish, then translated it back to English myself (writing out any untranslated words as they would be pronounced by a Spanish speech synthesizer):
Ey, it's me, simply calling to greet. In the case in San Francisco and it is preparing to support and ten fifteen minutes to house. I got a return call. Obviously, my phone. I'm going. We hope that you had a rapid Wilkinson. Opay all goes well and I will become to the day with you all soon bee-ay bee-ay.
I don't know if this link will last, but at the moment you can hear it spoken by a speech synthesizer here (or here, if you want to hear the Spanish). Gosh, I wonder why translating telephones never caught on...

Right, so if that's 1999, how'd he do in 2009?

• "Supercomputers match at least the hardware capacity of the human brain—20 million billion calculations per second... A $1000 personal computer can perform about a trillion calculations per second." Supercomputers are an order of magnitude behind that prediction, and his repeated claim that the human brain has a capacity of 20 petaflops, as I said before, completely absurd. Teraflop-plus personal computers are out there, but that's just Moore's law at work, not something new. Anyway, over the course of the last decade, we've largely stopped noticing the increase in processing power. Software expands to take use of the resources available—when Office 2007 came out, for example, it took longer to load on a contemporary computer than Office 2003 did in 2003. Software (which does not improve exponentially, by the way) often doesn't use the hardware very efficiently—this is particularly true on multi-core computers. Also, we're moving more and more towards smaller but less powerful computers—netbooks and smartphones use hugely underpowered processors compared to desktops. So, while true, it's not very useful.
• "Personal computers with high-resolution visual displays come in a range of sizes, from those small enough to be embedded in clothing and jewelry up to the size of a thin book". How exactly do you put a high-resolution visual display in a piece of jewelry, anyway? I mean, make the resolution as high as you want, you're not going to browse the web on a half-inch screen. Anyway, this seems to imply he believed that desktops would be obsolete by 2009, which is a bit silly in retrospect. Yes, we have computers the size of a thin book and smaller, but we don't use those as our primary computers. Big screens and big keyboards are just too damn important.
• "Cables are disappearing. Communication between components uses short-distance wireless technology. High-speed wireless communication provides access to the Web." This incredibly thick Cables To Go catalog begs to differ. (I got on their mailing list somehow.) Bluetooth and other wireless technologies are grand, but nine times out of ten it's cheaper and easier to run a few feet of cable. And for high-quality video and audio, cables are a must. As far as wireless Internet goes, the cellular phone networks are now the only real national option, and they're still much, much slower than wired connections. Most people connect either by wired or short-range wireless (i.e. WiFi) connection. Maybe in ten more years.
• "The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition... but keyboards are still used. CSR is very accurate, far more so than the human transcriptionists who were used up until a few years ago." Oh, snap! Mirabai, you just got CALLED OUT by Ray Kurzweil! Seriously, speech recognition software is miserable compared to human speech recognition. Humans can (unconsciously!) select a single speaker at a crowded party and understand them clearly, even if it's a complete stranger talking about something the listener doesn't know much about. Speech recognition software may have a 95% accuracy rate under ideal conditions, but that's like me saying I can beat an Olympic sprinter as long as they're running backwards up a hill through sand. Take them out of the ideal conditions, and they get destroyed. Hell, I can't even ask my car to turn the radio off if the heater's turned up too high, because the fan noise confuses it.
• "Most routine business transactions... take place between a human and a virtual personality." Thank God, no.

You know what? There are a lot more predictions. They're pretty much all wrong. Many of the wrong guesses are based on ideas that seemed promising in 1999 and then turned out not to be. Others are based on the theory that technology alone is required to make an idea happen, leaving aside the questions of practicality, cost, and above all consumer desire—videophones and automated highway systems being classic examples (both of which have sunk more futurists than just Kurzweil). Predicting the future is hard! Most people who try are wrong! It's usually easier to see problems coming than guess what the solutions will be. As an occasional writer of science fiction, I am absolutely guilty of making very wrong guesses about how the future will unfold—that comes with the territory. It's not Kurzweil's incorrect predictions that bother me, it's his incorrect assumptions. His whole theory is based on a foundation of wishful thinking and bollocks. And he should know better! Grrr!

playfully posted by Martin Marks at 2:17 in the afternoon // eight comments by:

• Moss
• Martin
• Martin
• Erika
• Fafner
• Sumana Harihareswara
• Martin
• Martin

 

I think "flays" is the creepiest one I've seen so far.

Been a while since I did a snowclone search, but this does seem the appropriate day for it.

extraneously posted by Martin Marks at 4:52 in the afternoon // one comment by:

• Tim

 

Tapestry.

I'm definitely not a synaesthete—and I'd give both legs to be one—but I have noticed that sometimes, when I'm reading something, the writing style provokes an almost sensory reaction. It usually happens when I'm reading something that, in some intangible way or another, reminds me of something I've written before. It's like it brings up all the emotions and memories I have tangled up in my own writing and the life experience that fuels the writing, all at once, too quickly to disentangle the threads.

needlessly posted by Martin Marks at 3:04 in the afternoon // comment? by:

 

Ah! Ça ira!

Back in the French Revolution, there was one Occitan revolutionary who was known by the nom de guerre "Toulouse", after his home town. He rose to prominence after his stirring "Nothing Left" speech, in which he decried the way the aristocracy had taken everything from the French people, leaving them with nothing. As the Revolution turned into the Reign of Terror, he sided with the Enragés and carved out a niche for himself in rural France, well-insulated from Robespierre and the other Jacobins in Paris, where he and his followers formed a commune built on the most radical ideals of the Revolution. However, as time went on, Toulouse, like so many of his contemporaries, became a petty dictator. After his second-in-command questioned the direction that the commune was going, Toulouse had him executed.
On hearing about this, one of Toulouse's followers turned to a friend and said, "But, citoyen, how does executing his lieutenant help the cause of freedom for all France?"
His friend scoffed and replied, "Pah! Freedom's just another word for 'Nothing Left' Toulouse!"

effusively posted by Martin Marks at 12:28 in the afternoon // two comments by:

• Tim
• Martin

 

"Nae joy, nae hope, nae nowt."

Okay, I've been saving up about five blog entries over the past week. I'm not saying you'll find them interesting, but that's never stopped me before.

So I've been watching Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, a British show that ran for two seasons in the 80s and then got revived in the early oughts. That's something you don't see too often over here. Imagine if some NBC exec suddenly thought to himself, "you know, I bet all of America is wondering what ALF is up to these days." American shows occasionally get resurrected—Knight Rider did—but generally more as a reboot than a continuation of the story, and not, as a rule, very successfully. But I can't imagine an American network resurrecting Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, a low-budget show with completely unknown actors that ran for 26 episodes, and that was a story very much based in the world of the 1980s. And it wasn't like any of the actors got famous after the show, either—Timothy Spall made it to the B-list, but he's about the only one. (And one of the actors was already dead before the second season was even over, so they had to bring in flipping Mickey for the reboot!)

Anyway, the original ITV series, from 1983, was a rather clever character-based comedy about a bunch of English tradesmen who can't find work in Thatcherian Britain, and so work as Gastarbeiter on a building site in Düsseldorf. The seven main characters end up all working together in a miserable little hut, and the story, such as it is, takes a backseat to the story of their personal relationships. The second season, from 1986, reunites the seven back in Blighty, but is more plot-oriented, moving them between three different building sites and building to a confrontation with a Scots gangster. They revived it on BBC One in 2002 with a third season, in which the three go from being the workers to being the bosses to being the workers again, as they dismantle the Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge and reassemble it on a reservation in Arizona, all while defeating the politicians, crooks, and cops who stand in their way. And then, because they got away with that level of ridiculousness, they did a fourth season in which they went to Havana and got involved in a tangled web of international espionage and dirty-dealing, and man I wish I was kidding. Summarized in a paragraph like that, the progression from the first season to the fourth seems worse than it is—it does get a bit silly towards the end, but the evolution is natural, and even though at times you can almost hear the pitch, the acting and the writing salvage the plots.

One of the truly great things about it is the accents—five of the greatest working class accents from all around Britain! The most prominent is Geordie, sported by the three central characters, but Cockney, Scouse, Brummie, and the West Country all get their say. I think my favorite is the Bristolian accent put on by Pat Roach, which turns a massive ginger-bearded bricklayer named "Bomber" into the most adorable character on the show. However, such large quantities of Geordie are probably unhealthy. I keep on having to stop myself from saying "howay!" now.

Anyway, recommended! I'd say put it on the queue, but I just looked and Netflix divvn't has it, so this was a waste of a blog entry, then, wasn't it?

methodically posted by Martin Marks at 9:03 in the evening // one comment by:

• the old felller

 

Pretty convinced now that I'm not a tulku.

I never used to take so much joy from material possessions, but the car and the phone have conspired to make me That Guy, and I'm not sure what I think about it. On the one hand, I'm sure I'm very boring to talk to these days. But on the other, dang, my phone and car are both just so awesome! (To be fair, the phone in particular is not so much about the material thing itself as it is the level of total interconnection with the human race. It's about as close as one can get to transhuman to date.)

In my early 20s, I spent several years of my life in long-term, healthy, wonderful relationships. Currently, in my later 20s, I have spent the past several years of my life earning enough money to be both independent and comfortable. The two periods never overlapped. During the "love" period, I was frequently happy, but during the "money" period, I've been more content. Is it so wrong to admit that I think I prefer the latter?

bashfully posted by Martin Marks at 9:36 in the evening // one comment by:

• Erika

 

It would all come down to the delivery, I think.

I have a silly line of dialogue stuck in my head, and nowhere to use it, so I release it into the public domain:

"I'd like a virgin Martini."
"You mean an olive?"
"Better make it a double."

hesitantly posted by Martin Marks at 1:52 in the afternoon // one comment by:

• Tanya

 

It's Spenserian, bitches!

So originally I had the idea that if you used all lowercase letters, no punctuation, and creative use of whitespace, you could make hip hop lyrics look like pretentious modern poetry. To wit:

shake it
shake
shake it
shake it
     like
          a polaroid
               picture

This train of thought led inevitably to what follows. I make no apologies.

And if thou seek'st, I tell thee thou mayst find
Me here within the confines of this club
Held in my hand, good Pérignon's sweet wine,
My cup fair overbrimming with the bub.

And if thou seekest pleasure, I'm thy hub:
The chemicals I carry in my purse
(Derivéd from the sassafras's shrub)
Hold power to raise dead men from their hearse.

And if thou seekest something more perverse,
Then wrap thyself in my unchaste embrace!
(Though if thou seekest love, old Adam's curse,
Be warned I have no patience for the chase.)

Should some man challenge kingship of this club
Anon I'll crown him with this flask of bub.

(So apparently MDMA is actually made from sassafras oil! You learn something new every day.)

defiantly posted by Martin Marks at 3:45 in the afternoon // three comments by:

• anne
• Remi
• Tanya

 

So, any of you ladies want to practice on me?

Also: I have been meaning for a while to respond to Julia's post on this comic, and specifically on this post about that comic. The short version: an xkcd strip about a man wanting to talk to a strange woman on the subway was reevaluated from the perspective of women who, for excellent reasons that men rarely have to think about, didn't want to talk to strange men on the subway.

I have experienced the feeling of seeing an attractive woman in public and wanting to strike up a conversation, particularly when I was younger and rode the Metro a lot. I'm not going to pretend that the reason I never did so is because I respected the fact that women see strange men very differently from how men see strange women—actually, I never did so because I am a coward. But now, older, wiser, and I hope more empathetic, I feel like I can see the problem from both sides (though obviously more clearly from the side that biology has put me on) and I would never now approach a strange woman without a blatant come-hither. But by the same token, I'm sure that there are many, many young women out there who see cute boys on the train and would love them to strike up a conversation. But if the cute boy is a good boy, he won't initiate it, because he knows that he can't really know whether she wants him to or not.

This is a dilemma, and yet it seems like there is a very simple solution: Women need to start hitting on men more often. This marks a fundamental shift in the balance of power between genders. If the odds are 1 in 60 that a strange man is a rapist, they are probably 1 in 6,000 that a woman is. Therefore, it makes logical sense that the person who is far less likely to be a rapist should be the "aggressor" when striking up a conversation. While the man may find the conversation uncomfortable if he's not attracted to the woman, he is unlikely to be afraid of her, whereas under the current system, the woman is potentially subject to both discomfort and fear. Much more equitable my way. (There is a selfish motivation here as well, of course; frankly, ladies, we've been doing it since the Neolithic Revolution, and it's your damn turn.)

Now, actually implementing this change will take time, I admit. For my system to really work, we need to have "forward men" be as stigmatized as "forward women" were fifty years ago. Step one is to make women hitting on men unremarkable. That's still a work in progress, but another twenty years or so and we can have that part down. As it becomes more and more socially acceptable for a woman to hit on a man, we must simultaneously make it more and more unacceptable for a man to hit on a woman. This is perhaps easier than it sounds; if good men believe that women who are interested will come to them, they will have no reason to risk hitting on women who aren't interested. And once the good men stop hitting on strange women, then the only men who hit on strange women will be bad men by default, and women will know they don't need to be gentle in shutting them down. This gradual shift will begin to reinforce itself, becoming more and more dramatic, until about fifty years from now, when a man chatting up a woman on the train or even in a bar will be as shocking as if he had spat on the floor. At that point, either the Technological Singularity will hit and human consciousness will meld together into a vast interlinked cybernetic consciousness, or a catastrophic nuclear war will break out between the developed nations of the northern hemisphere and the less developed countries of the southern hemisphere. Still, on Mars, which will be populated either by non-cyber-augmented humans (due to the risk of damage to augments posed by cosmic rays) or by refugees from the radioactive wastelands of Earth, women will hit on men while riding the automatic electrotransport tube-pods every morning, and I will be vindicated!

gamely posted by Martin Marks at 10:33 in the evening // one comment by:

• Libby

 

I really can't come up with a title for this post.

What is it about the ability to "throw" things on a computer that is so immensely satisfying? My single favorite thing about my incredibly expensive and immeasurably awesome mouse is the throw-wheel; the scroll wheel clicks one line at a time unless you spin it hard, in which case it declutches and spins smoothly. And it's a nice heavy wheel; when you spin it, it'll keep spinning for like 30 seconds straight before the clutch reengages. Granted, there is basically no situation where scrolling down for 30 seconds straight makes more sense than simply hitting CTRL-END, but the feel of it! For some reason I can't understand, it's downright exhilarating. And then there's virtual throwing: in Android (and I think in most modern touch-screen OSes), when you flick a page up or down, it keeps going for a while. Google Earth does that too. Is it that the illusion of Newtonian physics on a computer screen makes the machine feel more organic, more like you're interacting with it directly?

defiantly posted by Martin Marks at 9:46 in the evening // comment? by:

 

I'm not quite sure if I'm one of the 46 million or not.

Verizon has 140.3 million landline subscribers, 89 million wireless subscribers, and 679,321 fans, according to the Facebook ad I just saw. 0.30%! Woo!

Okay, that's not fair. Fine, well, Facebook got 49,248,000 unique North American visitors in a typical month, as of 2008. That's probably grown to more like 60 million by now, but it includes people who check from both work and home, so we'll be conservative and say that 30 million North Americans check Facebook at least monthly. Let's pick a number at random and say that one in six regular Facebookers actually becomes fans of companies they like. That's 5 million people in North America, which is listed separately from "Latin America", so I'm assuming it to mean the US plus Canada, for a total population of about 338,917,000. That would mean that only 1.5% of North Americans who are fans of Verizon would list themselves as such on Facebook. Assuming that this ratio applies more or less evenly throughout North America, that would mean—assuming I've got this right—that Verizon actually has 46,046,687 fans. So, by my logic, 20% of Verizon users are fans. (Although in reality this is inflated by those people who aren't Verizon users but are, inexplicably, fans of it anyway.)

Why did I do this exactly?

surreptitiously posted by Martin Marks at 8:12 in the evening // one comment by:

• Martin