Things Which Bore People

Supreme Court Decision a Day: Roe v Wade

2012-02-10T17:27:00.000-08:00

The vast majority of Supreme Court decisions are actually about pretty boring stuff. There's case set to be heard in a couple of days, Taniguchi v. Kan Pacific which will determine whether the payment for translation services extends to the payments for translating text documents. The case is over a matter of slightly more than $5,000, and the outcome, no matter what's decided, will be of little interest to anyone. So most of what the Supreme Court decides is not of interest to anyone but lawyers and judges, and you can go your whole life without ever hearing about the outcome or having it affect you. Like Brown v Board, this is not one of those cases.

Full Text: At Findlaw.

Held: Abortion is legal in the first trimester at the discretion of a woman's physician, can be limited by the State in the second trimester, and can be limited or made illegal in the third trimester.

Remember what I said in the last post about the Supreme Court having a limited amount of institutional legitimacy that it must carefully spent? Well, this was one of those decisions that spent a whole bunch of that institutional legitimacy.

A quick overview: this was actually three cases brought before the court. The first was Roe, an unmarried woman who had an abortion. The second was a married couple who might like an abortion in the future (due to medical issues). And the third was a doctor who kept getting arrested for performing abortions. The second and third cases were dismissed, though that's kind of moot because of how broad the ruling was - I believe this is what you'd call a "shotgun approach" to the judiciary; present a bunch of cases and then hope that one of them is decided in your favor. (Though of course it's much more complicated than that, I will grant you.)

So, with the married couple and the doctor out of the way, we get to the meat of the issue; to what extent does a right to abortion exist? The first question that has to be gotten out of the way is whether or not a fetus is a person; the Court says that there's no good basis for this in common law, the Constitution, or anywhere else. They leave aside the question of when metaphysical personhood begins, which is probably wise.

In the Court's brief history of abortion law in the United States, they show evidence of a gradual tightening, which they attribute mostly to the medical problems inherent in it. For this reason they place a great deal of importance on the mother's health in their decision, which is part of the State's interest and why they are allowed to make any laws at all about abortion. As a pregnancy goes on, an abortion gets more and more dangerous, which means that the State's interest becomes greater and greater. Prenatal life is somewhat secondary to that, coming into play only once "viability" is reached, which the Supreme Court (somewhat arbitrarily) places at the end of the second trimester (which they would later overturn).

"Viability" is one of my big problems with this case. The real problem with viability is that's it's incredibly vague; there is a percent chance at every point in a pregnancy where the fetus could be grown into a human being. If the fetus has a 25% chance of surviving outside the womb, is that truly at the point of viability? It's a tricky question, so the Supreme Court just made an arbitrary distinction - which really should have been the job of the legislature rather than the judiciary (if they could get their heads out of their asses). There is also the (stated) problem that it can be difficult to know when exactly a child was conceived. And further to that, there is another problem with viability; as time goes on, and technology gets better, the amount of time between conception and viability continually decreases. With IVF, we're at the point where we can "conceive" outside of the body, and it's not so far fetched that in another fifty years we'll be at the point where it's technically possible to remove an embryo or fetus at any stage of pregnancy and keep it alive.

Here's one of the other things that I don't like about Roe v Wade; it fails to address a couple of the criticisms. The Supreme Court just sort of side-steps the whole issue of when "life begins" by saying that since no one else can seem to come to a conclusion, they don't have to. The counter to this is the quite logical argument that if we're balancing prenatal life against privacy (as Roe says), and we don't know what the effect on or importance of prenatal life is, then we should err on the side of life - murder being a much graver issue than restriction. This could have been nullified, or at least partially nullified, by trying to bring some evidence against these notions of where life "begins", or countering the whole concept of there being a time when life begins.

The Supreme Court also ignores evolving understanding of embryology that (in part) led to this divergence of opinion. Part of the reason that the Romans believed as they did is that they had an incomplete understanding of what was really going on. They didn't know anything about cells, let alone DNA, sperm, or eggs. So giving such weight to prior precedent, when it was founded on false premises, seems foolish. (If I remember correctly, the Romans believed that the man's ejaculate was like a seed that grew in the woman's menstrual blood, and the soul was placed inside at some point after the body was built.)

Regardless, I agree with the decision, I just feel that it could have more fully addressed a few things.

The Good Stuff:

In view of all this, we do not agree that, by adopting one theory of life, Texas may override the rights of the pregnant woman that are at stake. We repeat, however, that the State does have an important and legitimate interest in preserving and protecting the health of the pregnant woman, whether she be a resident of the State or a nonresident who seeks medical consultation and treatment there, and that it has still another important and legitimate interest in protecting the potentiality of human life.

Supreme Court Decision a Day: Brown v Board of Education

2012-02-09T20:09:00.000-08:00

So I recently started reading Supreme Court opinions. This initially started when I was busy proving someone wrong on the internet, but I was quite surprised to find that they're (mostly) very human-readable. I suppose I just assumed that SCOTUS opinions were going to be arcane and incomprehensible, and so I had never read one. When Alyssa got me a Kindle for my birthday, I decided that it was time I begin a more in-depth reading of these opinions. With that in mind, I downloaded something from the Kindle store that claims to be "The 50 most cited Supreme Court Cases". I plan on going through these at a rate somewhat slower than one a day, but that's not as good of a title. (Some of these I learned about in school, of course, but that only covers about half a dozen of the fifty.) I will mostly not be taking in any outside sources or outside commentary. Also, be warned that if you're a lawyer you'll probably find this commentary to be clumsy and unprofessional.

Text: At FindLaw.

Held: Separate is not equal.

The first couple of cases in this collection are all really famous ones, so I'm going into this one with a bit more foreknowledge than I will be for the later ones. This is the case that overturned the doctrine set by Plessy v Ferguson - and good riddance. The beginning of the case goes over some of the history of both education and the law. In this case we see some of the slow evolution that always seems to move Supreme Court towards some monumental decision. Prior to this, there were a number of cases where facilities and services were separate but not equal - the black facilities always being worse (and cases which established at which times separate had to be equal). This one basically just comes out and says that even if you have equal facilities, budget, and staff, that's still not enough, because there are some things that are intangible but still required for true equality.

There are two things that I really like about this decision (aside from the outcome, which I of course agree with). The first is that it's unanimous - with a decision as large and as powerful as this one, it's nice to know that there weren't some holdouts to sour the whole thing with a dissent. Of course, there's a good reason for the unanimous decision, which isn't quite as feel-good.

The reason that the Court has lifetime appointments is so that they don't have to worry about re-elections if they make an unpopular decision, and so that they're relatively uncorruptable. But there's this concept called "institutional legitimacy" which says that the Supreme Court is only trusted insofar as the public believes that it makes fair decisions. If the Supreme Court makes bad decisions, the public will stop trusting them, and if the public stops trusting them then politicians will just start ignoring what the Supreme Court says. President Andrew Jackson famously said of the decision in Worcester v Georgia, "[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!" That sounds really badass, and it's the sort of thing that people love about Jackson, until you realize that he was talking about forcing the Native Americans off their lands and killing them. I hate Andrew Jackson. The same thing happened with this decision in a number of states because of shitty people, but it would undoubtedly have been much worse if this decision had come down 5-4 instead of 9-0.

So since they knew that Brown would be unpopular, the de-segregation Justices waited and plotted until they could wrangle a unanimous verdict with the force of their legal and emotional might. It's slightly less feel-goody, but I still really like that about this decision.

The second thing I like about this decision is that it came in advance of the Civil Rights movement had really gotten started - it's a rare instance of the government anticipating the turning of the times - something that seems to be the sole province of the Supreme Court. And at the same time, I don't like that it took so long to correct something that's so clearly wrong. I have a tough time with the past; I've heard it said a number of times that you shouldn't judge people because they're a result of the society that they grew up in ... but I always do. The thing is, the reasons for opposing segregation are the same today as they were then. The reasons for opposing slavery today are the same as they were three hundred years ago. In fact, you can read abolitionist texts from that side that say pretty much what I would say now if someone inquired why that's wrong. These same arguments were available to the people in the past, and they chose to reject them. So I'm forced to conclude that the large majority of Southerners throughout American history were just assholes, rather than victims of their upbringing. So while I really liked Brown, it makes me kind of sad.

References to Other of the 50 Cases: Plessy v Ferguson.

My Favorite Bit:

To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.

That's quite powerfully written, don't you think?

Books Read 2011 Data Mining

2012-01-11T13:38:00.001-08:00

Sometimes I wish that I'd taken more stats, so that I could do some better plotting of data. Either way, the sample of books I read in 2011 is probably too small to be meaningful. However, just for kicks, here's some data in chart form.

Authors

This graph by nationality is pretty unsurprising, as all of the books that I read last year were in English (the only language that I know), and only two of them were translated from another language (If on a winter's night a traveler and Invisible Cities, both written in Italian by Italo Calvino). There's a somewhat higher proportion of writers from the British Isles than you might expect, however.

Again, this is not surprising. The genres that I read tend to be dominated by men, and authorship generally tends to be dominated by men (for whatever reason). The one unknown there is K.J. Parker, which is a pseudonym whose author has not been revealed.

Here's another reason for some of the skew - when I read, I tend to read through lots of the same author at once. I read eight books by Charles Stross, which encompassed two different series and a number of one-ofs. I was only a few shy of reading every book he's published all in one year. I did the same for Iain M. Banks, though there are still two left on my nightstand that I'm either in the process of finishing or starting. I read a total of 60 books written by 32 authors, meaning about two books per author (though as is obvious from this graph, there were a number of outliers here). If I break it down into "Authors that I've read before" and "Authors that were new to me this year" the split is 12:30 (6:15).

Genres

This is a fairly hard thing to quantify, and I did it fairly arbitrarily. If I were going to run the data again, I would probably just use Amazon's genres. The Laundry Files series by Charles Stross are British spy thrillers with Lovecraft thrown in. Should they count as thriller, horror, or fantasy? Does a book about superheroes get put under science fiction or fantasy? Actually, if I had to do it over I would have a "check all that apply" system.

Books

This is a histogram of all the books, arranged by length. Note that this isn't *true* length, because it goes by pages rather than word count (or even better, character count). However, word count and character count aren't often readily available, and it was much easier to just jot down the number of pages from whatever I was reading. The longest book was Reamde at 1042 pages, while the shortest was Invisible Cities at 165 pages (that felt more like a short story or poetry collection than a proper book). You can see the excepted S-curve there: I've got outliers at both the long and short ends of the graph. A quick observation is that genre fiction tends to be much longer than non-fiction or artsy stuff. The average (mean) number of pages per book was 431, while the total number of pages read over the course of last year was 25,862.

One Sentence Book Reviews, 2011, pt. 3

2011-12-31T23:59:00.000-08:00

This is the third part of a three-part series. Part one, part two are available for perusing. I finished up the last book of the year at 10:20 PM on 12/31/2011, just barely meeting my self-imposed goal of sixty books for the year. I did National Novel Writing Month for November, which slowed me down a bit, so I've read another five books in the last week to make up for the deficit. Thankfully, I made it. This post will give a brief one-sentence review of books 41 to 60. Look for a number-crunching post in a couple of days.

A Matter of Time by Glen Cook - This book is rooted a little too much in its time (Vietnam), and the plot doesn't wrap up as nicely as it could have. It's basically a police story with a little bit of time travel thrown in.

If I Did It by O.J. Simpson - Despite the awful prose and the fact that much of the book is taken up by pointless details, I loved this book for how incredibly meta it was.

"Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!" by Richard Feynman - A well-written series of vignettes that manages to capture some of the wild energy and intelligence that Feynman projects.

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman - This is a science fiction classic for good reason - though it was written in response to the author's experiences in Vietman, everything in it still holds true.

The Magician King by Lev Grossman - This enhanced everything that I liked about The Magicians but it either has an incredible downer ending or is an obvious setup for a completion of the trilogy, depending on how sadistic I think Grossman is.

For The Win by Cory Doctorow - Infused with Doctorow's unique brand of techno-optimism, but it's a little bit too much like he was just adding in things that he saw on his RSS feeds. I also don't really like it when rich white guys write about third world problems.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow - A much, much better book than I For The Win, and one that seems much more timeless, or at least will age as a reflection of the period rather than a reflection of the moment.

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville - Nicely textured, and a good introduction to "weird" fantasy.

Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks - My last Culture novel of the year, and probably one of my favorites, though the War in Heaven is much more interesting than the other plots.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline - A full burst of geek culture that manages to try very hard at saying nothing. Only read it if you're not a cynic.

Machine Man by Max Barry - Read this book if you're a cynic. It's bizarre and sometimes frightening, and you can only sort of tell that it was a serial.

The Fry Chronicles by Stephen Fry - I got suckered into reading this book because I thought that it was a full auto-biography, when in fact it only covers about six years. Fry is long-winded, in a good way.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks - This is the best piece of non-fiction that I read this year, though the title essay is much better than most of the others.

Reamde by Neal Stephenson - This is much lighter fare than Stephenson usually writes, which is to say that it has all of his trademark digressions with none of the meaty ideas in it.

The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge - An entertaining book, but very obviously needs a sequel to round out the trilogy that this and A Fire Upon the Deep will form, so much so that the whole book is pretty much worthless because it lacks a proper conclusion.

Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson - This was my first taste of Sanderson, and I liked it. Tightly knit, with interesting ideas and a formalized rule set that is sometimes sorely lacking in fantasy.

The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson - Some of the characterization seems a bit off when this book is placed in context of the previous book, though it avoids the plague of being a "middle book" in a trilogy.

The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson - This is the conclusion to the Mistborn trilogy, and the ending - where many, many things are wrapped up - is very good.

The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson - A continuation of the Mistborn world, which is entertaining but needs a sequel so as to wrap up some loose plot threads. It also fails to answer some questions that I have, but that's more due to the author not wanting to have page upon page of exposition.

Toward a Truly Free Market by John Medaille - This was an "alternative economics" book, which suffered from the classic flaw of correctly describing the problem but giving a poor solution. It also runs into some worldview problems that make it seem like it would be more at home in the 1950s than present day.

Data-Mining My Reddit Comment History

2011-09-26T01:50:00.000-07:00

Alright, so I was cruising reddit the other day and found a python script that mines through your comment history and pulls all that information into a text file. I immediately did so. One small downside of this is that only the last three months of comment history are stored for access from your comment history page (the rest being archived into a different database, or different section of the same database), so this is just a snapshot of three months of comments. Once I had the text file, I stripped out all the metadata that the script put in, stripped out all the URLs I had linked in comments, and started on trying to see what I could do with this corpus.

Let's get the boring statistics out of the way: the corpus contains 378,294 characters and 67,979 words. The Fleisch-Kinkaid Grade level is 11 (that is, the corpus as a whole is understandable only if you've reached 11th grade), while the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease score is 52 (fairly difficult, good for those at the end of high school).

Top Five three word phrases:

"a lot of" - 50 times
"be able to" - 37 times
"one of the" - 34 times
"I don't think" - 29 times (possibly there because I like to contradict people)
"problem is that" - 27 times

Top Five four word phrases:

"in the first place" - 16 times
"the problem is that" - 13 times
"aabb aabb aabb aabb" - 10 times (this comes from me making Punnett squares)
"would be able to" - 8 times
"is going to be" - 8 times

Here's a word cloud of my most commonly used words (generated with the help of Wordle):

From that, you can see that "people" is my most commonly used word. Note that the word could excludes the most commonly used words in the English language; for fun, here's a table which compares my use of those words to that of the Brown corpus:

Brown Corpus	My Reddit Comment Corpus
THE	THE
OF	TO
AND	THAT
TO	A
A	OF
IN	AND
THAT	IS
IS	I
WAS	IT
HE	IN
FOR	YOU

For fun, I ran it through a parts-of-speech tagger which has about a 97% success rate; here's a table that shows the various categorizations and frequencies of speech. I'll skip past the part where I had to enter a bunch of information into a spreadsheet and just show you the colorful pie chart:

You have to admit that it is quite colorful. Go on, click to make it larger; I'll wait. It's not shown there, but the verbs BE, DO, and HAVE make up about 30% of the total verb usage. Verbs (and nouns) used have a Pareto distribution, (with BE at the head of the tail) which is quite hard to show in a meaningful way, and usually doesn't tell you a lot more than simply knowing that it's long-tail distributed.

I may add a second part onto this post later which does some actual analysis, but first I have to read a couple of linguistics papers and see how the above data deviates from normal (if it does). Then I'd have to make some conclusions about what that actually means, if anything.

On The Pros and Cons of Brain Uploading

2011-09-20T12:21:00.000-07:00

First, some definition of terms. When I talk about brain uploading, I mean making a copy of the brain with virtual neurons, virtual chemicals and virtual chemical receptors. I'm also starting with the premise that this virtual copy contains that nebulous quantity I'll dub "youness", though obviously that's up for debate. I consider it to be basic continuity of self, similar to how most people consider the same physical body to be consistently the same person across decades of time, even though the cells and molecules that make up their body are different, their personality is probably different, and their life experiences, outlook, etc. are all different. With uploading, the discontinuity happens all at once, rather than being spread out over time. One last assumption: we're talking about non-destructive uploading; your physical brain will continue living.

Pros

Immortality. If your brain is virtual, you never have to die. Your virtual brain can be built to be more fault tolerant than your physical brain ever was, with error-checking built in.
Low costs. A physical brain and body requires a home, three meals a day, and clothing at a bare minimum. To go different places, you need a car or public transport, both of which cost money. A virtual brain just needs a computer to live in, and bandwidth to interact with the world (if that's considered desirable).
Full access to virtual worlds. I'm sort of working on the assumption that if you're able to upload your brain, the technology is at the point where we can make fairly accurate simulations of the world in general. To have full immersion into a virtual world, you need haptics, audio, visual, smell, taste, and physical feedback. Alternately, you would need someone to directly manipulate the brain, which either requires ultra-godlike levels of technology or invasive surgeries and merely godlike technology. If you're virtual, it's as easy as hooking up your virtual brain stem to virtual nerves in a virtual body. You'd be able to live in a perfect paradise, go on amazing adventures, and fulfil your wildest fantasies.
Extra-human experiences. Would you like to experience what it's like to be a dog for a couple days? Go right ahead! Change genders, make up your own gender, live as a tree for a couple of years! Experience the wonders of five-dimensional living!
Time control. If your brain is hardware independent, which it arguably should be, you would be able to speed up or slow down your subjective experience of time. The speed up factor would be limited by hardware, but even a conservative factor would allow you to experience two minutes for every one minute your physical brain would have experienced. At the higher end, you could spend a hundred years playing games while waiting for a friend to come over. Slow down isn't limited by hardware at all; once you got bored with life, you could take in a decade every few hours to see how human history ends up playing out, or you could set up the equivalent of Google Alerts to bring you into realtime when something happens (the invention of time travel, extraterrestrial contact, birthdays and anniversaries, etc.).
Full control of your emotions and thoughts. This is a bit further down the road, and admittedly you'd be able to accomplish some of this with a physical brain once the tech improves. However, it would still be easier and faster in a virtual brain. If you're feeling depressed, you could just adjust your serotonin levels. If something bad happened and you don't want to remember it, you could just delete the memory. You could give yourself ambition, willpower, and whatever other quality you deem lacking in yourself. You could choose to live your life in a constant adrenaline high, or awash in a pure, non-addicting pleasure.
The ability to fork your consciousness. If your brain is virtual (and hardware independent), you can freely make copies of it. Instead of "the road less travelled", you could take both paths, and talk with your other self to see how things are going. You could spin off a bunch of copies if you wanted to run a company with all the employees being you. Don't know whether you want to break up with your girlfriend? One copy stays, the other goes. That brings us to ...
The ability to merge consciousness. You could merge the copies back together, so that you had both sets of experience. This would make it easy to learn new things and have different experiences, assuming that you didn't want to (or weren't able to) just edit those things in later. Or, if there's someone you like a lot, you could merge together with them and become one person.

Cons

Identity theft. Imagine how fucked you would be if someone stole a copy of your brain. I don't normally use profanity on this blog, but that's pretty much the only word to describe what you would be: fucked. They'd be able to rip every secret out of your head, from passwords to crushes to things that you never wanted anyone to know. If you're lucky, the person who stole your brain only wants it to take all your worldly possessions and tell everyone about all the awful things you've ever thought. If you're slightly less lucky ...
Eternal slavery. If someone got a copy of your brain, it wouldn't be too hard to construct a partitioned reality for it brain so that you didn't have access to the greater world. From there, they could get you to do anything they wanted to. Even if you only have a high school education, they could put you to work answering phones, running the AI in a videogame, or whatever else. Think of any current job that you don't really need a body for; they could have you (and lots of other copies of you) doing that for basically free. The virtual brain doesn't need to sleep or eat, and the cost to run it is the same as running a server. Because you're just a brain, they could cause you an infinite amount of pain, and reward you with small, sporadic doses of pleasure. But at least that's just for the purposes of conditioning and getting you to do something useful. It could be worse ...
Hell. You know, being tortured in fire forever? Now, you might be thinking to yourself, "What kind of sick person would put a virtual brain into a virtual body in virtual hell?" 4chan, that's who. Or maybe just anyone who doesn't like you and has a different view about whether or not a virtual person is actually real. Or a religious group that thinks that virtual people don't have souls, and uses their hell as a way of dissuading people from uploading. The point being, there are lots of reasons for people to put you in a hell. All the wondrous possibilities of virtuality take on a darker tone when someone is using those features to keep you in agony.
Lotus Eating. All the fun and games of the virtual don't actually affect anything in the real world. So while you're sitting inside the machine having a wonderful time, there's no longer any purpose to your life. Would you personally be able to resist a life of limitless meaningless pleasure, especially when you can delete the nagging part of you that wants more from existence? Whether or not you would even consider this a downside is dependent on personal philosophy.
Uncertainty. Once your brain is virtual, you have literally no way of knowing what is or is not real, and your ability to discern truth becomes seriously impaired. From your perspective, you go to sleep inside the MRI and wake up with your entire reality attached to something that you don't really understand (unless you're one of the few people involved in developing the technologies, in which case you don't really need this guide). In the real world, there's a possibility (no matter how remote) that everything you see is being controlled by some near-omnipotent entity that alters your memories, moods, thoughts, and perceptions. If your brain is virtual, that possibility becomes several factors more likely.
Self-competition. The continuity of consciousness argument would basically say that the physical you and the virtual you would be logically bound to following a heightened version of the golden rule. However, physical you and virtual you won't necessarily have the same goals, and could possibly see some benefit in screwing each other over - especially if the virtual you isn't under the direct control of the physical you. So as soon as you create this virtual copy, you'd have to worry about it competing for your job, or for your girlfriend's affections, or trying to get legal ownership of all the things that belong to the physical you.

What I Want Out of Superman

2011-08-08T09:27:00.000-07:00

Superman has always bugged me. The idea of dressing up in a special outfit and going to fight crime I can sort of understand, but it makes more sense for Batman than for Superman. Batman devotes nearly his whole life to fighting crime; even those token times spent as Bruce Wayne serve mostly to provide a cover (and income) for his crime-fighting. Batman needs a base, equipment, and intelligence gathering. And after all, it's not like Bruce Wayne can just disappear - if he did, all of the nice gadgets that makes Batman a real threat to the underworld would disappear too.

On the other hand, look at Superman. He's super-strong, super-fast, has laser eyes, X-ray vision, super-breath, flight, and invulnerability. He doesn't need money or a base. In most iterations, he doesn't even need to sleep. There's no reason for him to have a secret identity, from a crime-fighting perspective. The reason for Clark Kent must, therefor, be personal.

One of the biggest things I hate about Superman is kryptonite. To me it always smacks of a cheesy plot device. Authors and screenwriters seem to feel that Superman is too powerful, so kryptonite is needed to add in some element of danger, so that the audience actually feels suspense. They actually do the same thing in some of his rescue scenarios - Superman is almost always just barely strong enough, or just barely in time. But to me, that seems the wrong way to go. It should never be a question of whether Superman will succeed.

Superman should be at risk for failure not because his powers don't work, but because the situation doesn't call for the application of brute force. He should have trouble fitting in with human society, wanting desperately to be accepted but not really knowing how to interact with people. The only reason that people adore him as Superman is because he saves their lives; as Clark Kent, he has no power, and without the grand deeds his attempts at charm just look weak and pathetic. Add to that the fact that he's kind of a uncompromising zealot, and you can see how he'd have problems when he can't hide behind having incredible powers.

And think about how tortured he must be. His super-hearing, depending on which version you go by, spans the whole world. With his super-vision, he can see through walls and watch the whole city at once. He knows that every second he spends as Clark Kent is a second that he's not saving someone from death. He can hear suicides screaming as they plummet to their death. He can hear women being raped, children being beaten. And the Clark Kent persona is so valuable to him that he stays in it, and only rushes off when there's a bigger emergency. Let's assume that Metropolis is like New York City. That means per day, there are 1.4 murders, 2 forcible rapes, 59 robberies, and 66 aggravated assaults. Those are just the violent crimes - that doesn't include all the fires, accidents, suicides, burglaries, natural disasters, etc. And yet Superman still spends a third of his time at playing human as Clark Kent. How did he come to that decision? Why does he choose to let people die?

One of the most common arguments against God is that there's still evil in the world. If there's evil, and God has the ability to stop but doesn't, then God must not be good. To my mind, the same applies to Superman. Especially after he has an interview with Lois Lane, wouldn't the public hate him for all that he doesn't do? Can't you just see the angry mother crying through an interview? "Superman stopped the train from derailing and then flew off, fast as lightning. Not three minutes later, my son was shot to death in an alley by a mugger. Superman was the only - theonly - one that could have saved him, could have stopped the bullets, and instead he just flew away. Where did he go? Why was my son less deserving of life than those people on the train?"

Or let's say that Superman actually does try to stop every crime in Metropolis. Even he isn't sufficiently powerful to stop them all, so he'd have to invent some kind of sorting algorithm (such as "If I have to choose between saving a life and saving property, I will choose to save a life"). And how would he decide? He'd be utterly crucified by the public, pretty much no matter what he chose, and it probably still wouldn't help him with the grey areas. People would write letters to the editor asking why Superman doesn't stop abortions from taking place, or they'd complain that his super-hearing and super-vision are tantamount to panopticon surveillance, or they'd complain that he's not doing anything about the prostitution problem, or they'd complain that he's exacerbating the plight of the poor, or they'd complain that he's contributing to the overpopulation of the prisons. A city with Superman working at full-speed, all the time, is one where he becomes the de facto police, and the policies that Superman enforces become far more important than the ones that are made by politicians.

You know what I think Superman feels when he comes across supervillains? I think he feels relief. Because here, finally, is something big and unambiguous, a true evil that can be stopped for good instead of a systemic problem that doesn't have a good solution. When he punches Luthor into the ground, he can forget about the liquor store robbery he stopped a few days before, and the man he put in jail whose children will grow up without a father. When Doomsday comes down, Superman can stop thinking about whether delivering food to starving people in Africa is depressing the demand for local crops and perpetuating the cycle of hunger, and just solve a problem by using his fists.

One Sentence Book Reviews, 2011, pt. 2

2011-08-04T18:05:00.000-07:00

I've gotten through another twenty books since last time. This puts me about a month ahead of schedule in my reading, which means that I might just have time to read Infinite Jest after all.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman - Cynical and somehow still wondrous, and offers a nice variety of emotional impacts.

Bossypants by Tina Fey - Comes from the "collection of anecdotes" school of autobiographies, but still manages to stay entertaining and have small moments of insight.

Transition by Ian M. Banks - My least favorite book by Banks so far, mostly because it seemed florid to the detriment of coherence, which I've found to be one of his most common authorial sins.

The Family Trade by Charles Stross - Doesn't really offer anything new. It has all the technical grit of Stross with none of the usual charmingly original ideas.

The Hidden Family by Charles Stross - Sequel to the above, and ideally (since this is a six book series) shows some promise of how he'll expand the central premise into something better.

Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde - Fforde seems to write the Thursday Next books in trilogies, and this first one was somewhat aggravating because it doesn't resolve anything.

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins - A book steeped in a deep and abiding anger, and which retreads so many arguments I've heard over and over. I'd recommend it for someone who knows nothing about atheism, but not anyone else.

The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde - Somewhat better than Lost in a Good Book, mostly because it's more whimsical and fleshes out BookWorld a bit more.

Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde - The culmination of this Thursday Next cycle, and for that reason probably my favorite. It also offers a lot of twists (and time travel!), which I dearly love.

First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde - ... And we get right back to the start of a new cycle, with too many plot hooks hanging. I also think one of the problems with whimsy (the defining feature of Fforde's writing) is that eventually things start to get too crowded.

Guns, Germs, Steel by Jared Diamond - Very interesting, but he labors a little too long on proving himself, which tends to be a problem with books which are attempting to present novel science theories (as opposed to books which present pop science that already has sufficient backing from the community).

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov - This was my first reread of the year, and I liked it much less than I did in high school, mostly because the narrative seems too disparate.

The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Micheal Chabon - Despite (or because of) the fact that I had to keep consulting a Yiddish dictionary, it was interesting and atmospheric.

Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson - World War Z, but this time with robots and worse porse!

The Company by K.J. Parker - This book is so multi-layered that I'm not sure what the ultimate message was, which I think works to its benefit.

A Dance With Dragons by George R.R. Martin - An improvement over A Feast For Crows, but only by a little bit, and Martin hangs too many cliffs.

7th Sigma by Steven Gould - It unfortunately looks like Gould will never top Jumper. There are too many hints towards a central plotline that never comes to fruition.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino - More like reading a book of poetry than an actual novel.

Rule 34 by Charles Stross - This is the Stross that I know and love, with a fast pace and interesting ideas at every turn. It's only slightly marred by being written in the second-person - I understand why he did it, but I think it hinders immersion more than it helps.

If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino - I can't decide whether this book was brilliant or completely masturbatory, but I'm leaning towards the former. There are books within the book, and a series of events that get continually more absurd.

When Life Begins

2011-07-11T12:18:00.000-07:00

Let me be upfront: this whole blog post is about how much I hate the phrase "Life begins at conception".

The problem is twofold. First, it's incredibly ambiguous. "Life" can mean a whole bunch of things. I believe when pro-life people use the term, they mean it in the sense of "continuity of identity". To them, the single cell (zygote) is equivalent to a person that you see walking down the street. It's an interesting question of identity that I'll address later. The real problem is that life can also just mean "something which is living". No one can deny that the zygote is alive - that's an objective, scientific fact. The problem is that it's only alive in the same sense that the rest of our cells are alive, or in the sense that a cat, cow, or mosquito is alive. Clearly living doesn't confer any special benefits to any entity. What counts is personhood. "Personhood begins at conception" is a much worse slogan though.

The second problem is a bit more serious. If we take the clarified phrase "Personhood begins at conception" to be the intended meaning, what do we do with all the weird complicating issues?

Take identical twins, for example. They both come from the same zygote, and share the same DNA, but we consider them to be different people. There are a couple of different ways that you can deal with this, and still maintain that personhood starts at conception.

Identical siblings are actually just one person. This is logically consistent, but you'd get laughed at by nearly anyone you said that to.
Identical siblings follow a special rule for personhood wherein they don't become people until the split happens. The original zygote was probably not considered to be a person in its own right. This is a poor explanation, because it's a partial concession that there are other factors for determining when personhood begins. Needless to say, "Personhood begins at conception, unless you're an identical sibling in which case it begins at division" makes the slogan pretty much unusable.
A zygote which will eventually become identical siblings was actually two (or more) people all along, we just didn't know it. This is sort of logically consistent, but it defies the whole continuity of personhood argument a little bit.

Here's weird complicating issue number two: chimeras. What happens with a chimera is that two different zygotes (from two different sperm/egg combinations) fuse together, and then that combination goes on to make one person who has some body parts made from one set of genetic code and some body parts made from the other. Here are some solutions:

A chimera is actually two people. This means that legally, marrying one would be considered polygamy and murdering one would count as two homicides. This is stupid, and I doubt anyone would be content with this logic.
Chimeras follow a special rule for personhood whereby they don't count as people until the merge happens. This has the same problem as with twins above, where it doesn't make all that much sense.
The two zygotes that make up a chimera were each only half of a person. But that wouldn't make sense, because it would be a tacit admission that not every zygote is a full person, and introduces the whole concept of "personhood calculus" into the mix, which most people are quite eager to avoid. (I am too, mostly because the results of personhood calculus leads to things which are politically incorrect, but which I still believe to be true.)

All this is leaving aside the fact all of these concepts like "life", "personhood", etc. aren't clearly defined in the first place. It's sort of puzzling to me that the legal definition of "person" is so murky - but then again, not really, because there are so many corner cases that making a clear distinction on what's what is just too damn hard (see above). From everything I've read about law, this is a bug inherent in legal systems.

It's usually at this point that someone would ask me, "Well, if personhood doesn't begin at conception, then when *does* it begin?" Unfortunately, I don't know, mostly because it's a problem with really poorly defined subjective terms. It's my feeling that personhood would be better understood as a gradient rather than a binary, but that raises a whole host of other issues, most important of which is how you determine where an entity sits on that gradient. I should also note that I'm including in these thoughts things that are more exotic than the timeline of human reproduction: animal consciousness, artificial intelligence, genetically modified humans, extraterrestrials, proto-humans, etc., the idea being that a proper theory of personhood would be all encompassing. I'll let you know if I ever figure out a system that works without kinks, but don't count on that being forthcoming anytime soon.

All of this is basically my way of saying that anytime you see a slogan being thrown around about a contentious political issue, you should immediately start thinking about the ways in which they're simplifying a complex issue. Due to my unbounded faith in humanity, I think most of the time they don't mean to be deceptive, they just haven't given things much thought.

(A word on souls: it's the position of some (ex. the Catholic Church) that the thing which defines personhood is the presence of a soul. Leaving aside how unscientific that idea is, this still leaves pretty much all of the same issues, and raises a few more. Do the two zygotes which form a chimera each have half a soul? Do twins only have half a soul each? Are souls imparted to zygotes which (it's debatable) are not human by virtue of chromosomal disorders? If the soul is immaterial, how can we possibly answer these questions? What reason is there to think that the soul isn't imparted at birth, but at quickening or when the fetus was "formed" (which was the position of many people, including the Catholic Church, for centuries)? Again, this is leaving aside the fact that I think the concept of a soul is incredibly stupid.)

One Sentence Book Reviews, 2011

2011-05-10T09:30:00.000-07:00

Okay, so this year I'm trying to get through 60 books, which I think it a reasonable goal that will keep me reading without getting sick of it. At year-end, I'll throw the list up along with some graphs about what my genre tendencies tend to be, authors I read, etc., but for now here are one-sentence reviews of the 20 books that I've read so far, because by the time January comes around I might not be able to remember some of these all that well. These are in the order I finished them. Also, I don't hew very closely to "one sentence".

The Peace War by Vernor Vinge - This is the kind of hard science fiction I like - a premise is set up, and then the author runs through all the implications of that, sometimes at the expense of other things.
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis - It had a good amount of British humor, though a number of the references were lost on me.

Blackout by Connie Willis - I thought that this book was at its best when it was giving a history lesson; I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or not.

All Clear by Connie Willis - I liked this much better than its sister book, mostly because it had an actual (bittersweet) ending.

The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross - I'm amazed by how much range Stross has.

The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross - This book is bound a little too tightly to its pastiche.

The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross - By this point, Bob Howard is getting a little too badass.

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge - The tines are one of the best realized fantasy/scifi races I've ever had the pleasure of reading.

A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge - Vinge proves his skill by writing a prequel that stands alone; there's something that I love about different cultures discovering things.

Consider Phlebas by Ian Banks - I can understand why people don't recommend this as an introduction to the Culture novels.

The Player of Games by Ian Banks - The hinted descriptions of the game of Azad were amazing, and I wish more of the book had been like that.

Excession by Ian Banks - Personal problems get in the way of an entertaining thriller.

Use of Weapons by Ian Banks - This is probably the best book written by Banks that I've read so far, but it seemed artsy to the point of distraction sometimes.

Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman - My dose of meta for a couple of months.

Halting State by Charles Stross - Highly entertaining, with a plethora of twists.

Glasshouse by Charles Stross - Takes place a little too far into the future, to the point where I wasn't really sure that I bought into the reality being presented.

Brainiac by Ken Jennings - This is my first non-fiction book of the year. It ranges quite a bit, and stays consistently interesting.

Halo: Cryptum by Greg Bear - An passive main character makes this only worth reading if you're really into the Halo mythos.

The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man by Mark Hodder - I prefer my steampunk to be scientific, not mystical.

The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman - Reminded me of a Heinlein juvenile, with all that implies.

The Other Ending of Pulp Fiction

2011-01-01T06:50:00.000-08:00

I keep having this same dream where there's an alternate ending of Pulp Fiction which everyone hates and I find absolutely hilarious. The actual details of this alternate ending aren't important, because like most dream stuff, they don't actually make sense in the context of reality. Just imagine me laughing my ass off in a movie theater while everyone else is leaving in disgust. The alternate ending of Pulp Fiction basically turns its back on the themes the movie originally had. People know the movie, and if they go to see it in an art house showing (which is what this was), they expect to see the real deal. In my dream, this is done by some grad student who's trying to make some kind of statement, but when he tries to hold a discussion afterwards, people are just cussing him out as they leave the theatre - except for me, because I'm laughing uncontrollably.

So when I woke up this morning, I realized something: this is a great idea.

I wouldn't actually do it with Pulp Fiction, because I don't think there's any way that you could destroy the whole movie with a single additional scene, but it would definitely work with some other movies. The trick, I think, would be to get movies that people actually know the ending to, and that are at least somewhat beloved. Here are some examples for your consideration. Some spoilers follow, but if you don't know these by now, you probably don't care that much.

In the alternate ending to Return of the Jedi, Darth Vader lives, everyone forgives him, and he and Luke have lots of happy times together.

In the alternate ending to American History X, the protagonist's brother doesn't get shot, and they final scene features the two of them tearing down the white power propaganda in his room together.

George Bailey realizes that even though he's made life better for a lot of other people, that doesn't change the fact that his own life is still completely miserable, and exactly a year after coming back, he takes his life on Christmas Eve, this time for good.

Ebeneezer Scrooge doesn't change his ways at all; seeing his own imminent death and all the things he's lost makes him even more spiteful and petty. This one would actually be pretty easy to pull off, because new versions of A Christmas Carol are made every year (for some reason).

Planet of the Apes ends with Heston running to the beach, where he sees a spaceship light up its landing thrusters; the rescue mission has finally arrived to bring him back to Earth.

Beatrix gets back together with Bill, and they set aside their differences to raise their daughter together.

The new ending to Watchmen features Rorschach and Night Owl stopping Ozymandias in the nick of time.

The Total Disclosure Project

2010-05-07T17:59:00.001-07:00

So I've said a couple of times on this blog that I'm not real big on privacy. Most of the time, the information that we generate every day is completely worthless, not only to people to know us, but to corporations. The only real concern is whether or not this information could be used against me - as with phishing attacks and things like that.

Anyway, here's what I want to do; live with most of my privacy stripped away. I've been thinking hard about how to actually accomplish this. The big problem with total surveillance (which is what this would amount to) is that I would have to involve everyone that I see in a social setting, and everyone that I work with. I don't really want to do that.

A less extreme version would go something like this;

Total location tracking provided by a custom app for Android which would automatically load information onto the web.
An online repository of receipts to track everything that I purchase.
Setting all privacy settings on social media to the lowest possible setting.
Logging media consumption and daily activities.
Logging biometrics.
Logging web-browsing history.
Photographing or filming parts of my life, preferably automatically.
Blogging more.

And here is a list of pros and cons.

Pros:

We tend to behave better when we know people are watching.
It would generate some useful discourse.
It would match up with my stated ideals.
It would tell me things about myself.

Cons:

It would mean at least some infringing on the privacy of people around me.
It's a little narcissistic.
It would be technically complicated.
It would open me up to identity theft if I wasn't careful.

So far, I like the idea, but I think it's sunk unless I get permission from Alyssa.

Edit: Okay, I have permission from Alyssa. Enabling location tracking was easy - it's now to the right of this blog. I'll be working on figuring out how difficult it is to do the rest of the stuff.

Arizona Nazis

2010-04-27T08:27:00.000-07:00

So there's a new bill out of Arizona which (basically) requires people to carry their papers on them at all times in order to aid the police officers of that state in cracking down on illegal immigration, along with a number of other measures.

Cue comparisons to the Nazis.

There's a famous quote by Ben Franklin, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." This has always struck me as a horribly vindictive statement. There are always trade-offs between liberty and safety; the real issue is managing the various exchanges so that you don't come out with a net loss, and the rate of exchange really depends on the individual person. It might be that Franklin was using careful wording when he said "essential liberty", but then again, I'm not really of the opinion that the phrase "essential liberty" is really meaningful. As the risk of getting stabbed in the back approaches zero, the amount of liberties I would give up approaches infinity.

I'm also usually for increased government information. A lot of our infrastructure and services would run better if there were, say, ubiquitous fingerprinting. It would allow the identification of runaways and dead bodies, it would help solve crimes, and it would make identity verification much faster (though a system of that sort would always have problems). Divulging medical information would greatly increase the speed of medical research (though this would require that no one could turn you down for insurance, or fire you from your job, because of that information). Full demographic information would better allow government distribution of funding, as well as sociological research that would further our understanding of which government programs are working and which aren't.

So I don't really see the problem with requiring people to carry around their ID. That's not such a big loss of liberty, especially since it doesn't even affect the majority of people who are carrying wallets and driver's licenses in the first place. You might argue about the right of the minority who don't want to have to carry that stuff, but I'm willing to place something as basic as identification as a requirement for living in this country (just as I'm willing to require the payment of taxes).

The big problem with the bill is that it's being perceived as racist. This is more a problem with the general perception of the government than anything else. People assume that a law passed like this is just going to be used to give the police a bullshit reason to stop and detain brown people. It might - I'm not from Arizona, I don't know how deep the police and government prejudice runs.

All I'm saying is that requiring identification is actually a pretty good idea.

Should the First Amendment Include Corporations?

2010-04-19T18:03:00.000-07:00

Alright, so the grievously stupid invocation of the First Amendment when talking about corporations is quickly becoming a pet peeve of mine, as I seem to be finding it everywhere I look. Also, Google recently made a post about their approach to free expression. (Made just a few days after my blog post. Coincidence? Yes.)

So a lot of people think that these major corporations are beholden to an ideal form of the First Amendment instead of the actual law. In part, this is because speech-through-intermediaries is a somewhat new concept. In the past, this took the form of letters to the editor, or call-ins to radio shows, or actual employment with the press. In some cases, this included hand-cranking presses in a small basement somewhere - and once a government starts cracking down on do-it-yourself presses, it's a pretty good sign that totalitarianism is nigh.

So why do we even have such a concept as free speech in the first place? I suppose it's because of the belief that free speech is good for our society. Majorities are often mistaken, which is why we need to have minorities to have reasoned discussion about what should be done. In a sense, the founding fathers left free speech to market forces. Good ideas would float to the top, while bad ideas would sink to the bottom, and in the end, society would be the better for it. Obviously, as with the free market, they saw the need to place restrictions on speech, hence "clear and present danger" etc.

As time went on, and America expanded, facilitated communication grew. In the era of letters, this mostly took the form of the USPS, which, as a government agency, falls under the First Amendment, and is thus fairly uninteresting. Given more time, new technologies and new ways of communicating came along. In 1910, telephones, telegraphs, and radio became "common carriers" which meant that they had to provide their services to the public without discrimination. This is one of the ways in which the United States is somewhat unique, and demonstrates one of the reasons that common law is sort of stupid. The idea of a "common carrier" originally belonged to transportation of people and goods, and was taken from that context to apply to information. In this sense, telecommunications are covered under the First Amendment, as they are services licensed by the United States government.

The original internet was built on the backbone of telephone infrastructure, which meant that it could be regulated by the FCC in the same way that telephone, television, telegraph, and radio services were. As time went on, and technology changed, DSL and cable got reclassified as an "information service", which is legally distinct from a "telecommunications service" and is the whole reason that anyone is arguing about net neutrality. But that's not what this post is about.

Even if the Obama administration comes down on the side of net neutrality and reclassifies the internet as a telecommunications service, there will remain the larger question of how to regulate the huge companies that control the flow of content. I am speaking specifically of Apple, Google, and Amazon. All three of those companies exhibit enormous power on the market not just of things, but of ideas. Small companies have been known to collapse when Google tweaks its search algorithm and sends their website to the second page of results.

So here's the question - is Google a common carrier? It's obviously not in the legal sense, as it doesn't fall under the authority of the government, but it is in the sense that people depend on it. Yet Google's whole job is to separate the useful from the worthless: in other words, discrimination. If Google were a common carrier, how would it function, as it by definition it needs to value some speech over others? In some senses it would be easier for Apple, as their app store would simply have to accept all submissions, and no song or podcast would be denied access to iTunes.

Right now, we depend on these companies to not cross any lines. A free market optimist might say that we have nothing to fear, as these huge companies have no real choice but to follow the will of the masses. I would respond that this is exactly why we should be afraid. On the other hand, if these companies trend liberal (and I believe they do) then it may mean that the undesirable parts of free speech, such as hate speech and conspiracy theorists, will suffer from erosion as they become less and less accessible.

(Note: this title has two potential meanings, but I'm pretty obviously talking about restrictions rather than protections, the latter having been decided in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.)

Corporations and Free Speech

2010-04-15T16:57:00.001-07:00

So there's recently been some murmuring about Apple and how awful it is that they block apps for political reasons. Phrases similar to "I guess Apple doesn't care about the 1st Amendment" keep cropping up. This also gets tossed around when any online service starts to censor people for any reason.

Let's get this straight right now; that is not what free speech means. The very first words of the First Amendment are "Congress shall make no law ..." You will note that those words explicitly mean that this does not apply to people or corporations (because corporations are people too). So a corporation doesn't have to give people a voice, even if it's in the business of providing voices, and it can censor those voices however it wants. The First Amendment argument only really has a place when it's the government which is restricting speech - such as the FCC slapping down fines on people. Why do people think this is the case? It's a misunderstand, sure, but there has to be a reason that so many people seem to misinterpret the law.

It might be a sense of entitlement. In this country, we have it hammered into our heads that we can say anything we want, short of a "clear and present danger" or defamation. But because of various technological advances, a huge majority of our speech is mediated by corporations. For me to make this blog post requires the use of a computer (made by HP), OS (made by Microsoft), blogging software (made by Google), and internet access (provided by Charter). At any point in that chain, there is an opportunity for censorship, because none of those corporations has any legal requirement to allow me to do what I want - in fact, I have "signed" contracts all of them, even if most of those were click-through EULAs that I didn't actually read.

The other reason might be that it doesn't happen all that often. People then assume that because it's not happening, it must be illegal. There is then the question of why it's not happening, and I have a few theories about that:

1) Restricting speech is bad for business.

If Company A restricts speech and Company B doesn't, people will be more likely to go take their content creation to Company B. While speech restriction might raise the overall quality of Company A's offerings, overall quality is pretty unimportant in the era of search. There are also a few (weak) legal grounds on which to sue Company A - misrepresentation and discrimination being the big two.

2) Restricting speech is damned expensive.

This is one of the things that always bothered me about 1984. Who is watching all of these people? It would take a huge amount of workers to police even a small slice of the content output of the internet, and it would be brutally inefficient to boot. In the future, this job will probably be handled by artificial intelligence - already there are algorithms that can pick out "content of note", but those are mostly used by our intelligence and advertising agencies.

3) Restricting speech happens, but it happens to people who aren't sympathetic.

There are certainly examples of this happening. This is why there aren't nude pictures on Facebook or graphic videos on Youtube. In those circumstances though, the company in question looks good, because they're removing something that most people don't want to see when they go to those places. In other words, it doesn't look self-serving. More problematic is the issue of copyrighted videos, which Youtube will remove even if they fall under fair use (though this is still its prerogative).

Of those three, I think that the second one makes the biggest impact. As time goes on, bots will get better at tagging objectionable posts for human review. They'll need to do this for all the stuff you're not allowed to put on any kind of commercial site, both of the "clear and present danger" type and the porno/graphic type. This is especially true now that the scepter of cyberbullying has been raised. As the technology gets better, the temptation will grow to turn it on whatever kind of speech hurts the corporate bottom line. This is especially true if, like Apple, you have the infrastructure set up to go through content by hand, one at a time.

Labor Implications of Content-Aware Fill

2010-04-13T20:59:00.000-07:00

So I've been checking out a lot of the the videos and commentary on Adobe's new Content-Aware Fill. I find several things about the online discussion to be fairly amusing.

Firstly, there are the people who claim that this is fake. I can sort of understand this, as it was originally posted around April Fool's. However, there's nothing all that funny about this particular technology, and nothing all the unbelievable. Of course, to some people, this is unbelievable - because Content-Aware Fill makes a lot of the menial labor parts of digital manipulation disappear.

Second, there are those people who see what it can do and get the wrong impression. They say "Finally! I'm going to have so much more time!" This belies a basic misunderstanding of market economics. If it takes less time to do something, you have fewer billable hours. While it's possible to reduce labor required and keep your prices the same, you'll quickly be undercut by your competition. This applies doubly so for a profession that's less likely to have permanent contracts.

Third, there are those people who think that this will cost people their jobs. This is the other side of the "labor saving" coin. I've often heard the argument that the only result of new technology is a shifting of labor. Basically it goes like this; I invent the cotton gin, which decreases the work required to seperate cotton fibers from cotton seeds by a factor of fifty. This makes cotton cheaper, which means more people will buy cotton, which means that I need to hire more people. Additionally, cheap cotton boosts a number of other industries, such as clothing manufacture.

I often question whether this is actually true. History has shown that increases in technology mean that labor will shift to less and less "essential" tasks, as seen by the movement over time from agricultural to industry to service. It's somewhat difficult to find the data to compare occupations over time adjusted for population increases, so I have no idea whether there are (for example) fewer farmers today than there were a hundred years ago. It actually seems likely that while the number of farmers has decreased over time, the number of people employed in secondary agricultural occupations (fertilizer, herbicide, and pesticide production, genetic engineering, tractor manufacture) has increased. Again this is just a guess - if I were in grad school, and for something other than computer science, this is probably what I would study.

What would happen first though is that prices would fall, which means more people would be able and willing to pay for graphical work. This gives a bit of a cushion. Additionally, since retraining takes both time and money, a new technology will reduce wages before it cuts any actual jobs.

Finally, there are those people who say "GIMP has been able to do this for years with the ReSynth plug-in". This is (mostly) true. But for whatever reason (I've heard it's mostly the UI) most people who do image manipulation for a living use Photoshop, and for them, if a feature isn't in Photoshop, it doesn't exist. Personally, I get most excited about technologies when they're being researched at universities. Content-Aware Fill owes a lot to PatchMatch, which was developed at Princeton by people who also work for Adobe. The problem, of course, is that it takes seemingly forever from any interesting technology to get from "cool idea" to "workable reality".

Meritocracy is the new Aristocracy

2010-04-12T21:02:00.000-07:00

It used to be that kings actually were better than everyone else. This was because of their diet; a prince or dauphin growing up would receive a lot more meat than a peasant child, not to mention how much more varied their diet was. So when they finally got to be king, they would be much more fit for their position than some random worker in the fields for whom meat was a special weekly treat. This is besides the fact that kings-to-be got a huge amount of training in matters both martial and intellectual. So it's fairly safe to say that kings were more fit to rule than their subjects.

Fastforward a few hundred years later, and the problem is well on its way to being fixed. The state tries its best to feed children as much as they need (though it fails miserably on several counts) and also to educate these children growing up (and again, tends to have decidedly mixed results) so that they can be useful members of society - if not at the upper echelons. In terms of intelligence and physical prowess among our youth, I think it's fairly safe to say that there's less of a divide between the rich and the poor than there was in medieval times.

But the big problem on the horizon is that education and nutrition are only the starting point. If you really want to improve your children's capacity for greatness, you'll engage in genetic engineering.

Intelligence, as a high level function, is going to be ridiculously difficult to engineer. Genetic engineering isn't all that sophisticated compared to where it will be in the end game, but that doesn't mean that we're not quickly approaching territory which used to be reserved for science fiction. In fact, the ability to engineer intelligence will most likely happen after human cloning becomes viable (especially if they lift the ban). Either way, once this happens, the divide between the rich and the poor will become even more pronounced, as rich children will be genetically superior to poor children, in addition to the host of other benefits they enjoy.

This is an interesting vision of the future that I don't think will come to pass. The big problem with extrapolating from current trends is that multiple trends happen at the same time. So while genetic engineering is moving fast, it's also competing with artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. Those three form the basic core of what's to be expected from the future, and they will all arrive into fullness in a series of quick steps that's already happening. So don't worry about the new aristocracy - worry about a million small things happening at once that will render this world unrecognizable.

What I Believe: Part 2

2010-04-08T06:24:00.000-07:00

Continued from Part 1.

Spirituality

The evidence for the existence of a god is weak. To me, of course, the question is one of proof. I think that's almost the antithesis of what most religions would teach, which is faith. I'm not saying that religious people have "God exists" as a simple axiomatic statement in their minds, because that's a somewhat reductionist view. People believe things for a whole host of reasons. Besides that, not all people have tried to build up their beliefs from a set of axioms - it's a somewhat stupid way to go about it. I also don't think that most people care if their beliefs are internally consistent (and I'm not really sure that mine are).

So while there might not be good evidence for the existence of a god, there's no evidence against it. In fact, I can conceive pretty easily of a being with massively more power than me - an entity capable of altering the laws of the universe at a whim and violating physical constraints. However, if such a being were to exist, I think that it would still follow a set of concrete laws, even if those laws aren't the same as those in normal existence.

I get there by imagining the universe as a virtual place, like a giant simulation being run on a massive scale. The simulation follows a set of rules, but the user running it can alter those rules at a whim or change variables while the simulation is in motion. That's what god is to me. But even in that case, god would have to follow a different set of rules and be constrained in some way by a bigger reality. To claim that there exist things that are not bound to any law or system is essentially nonsensical to me.

The biggest problem I've always had with the concept of a god is that pain and suffering exist in this world. So either God is not omnipotent, or not good. The argument against this is either that the divine plan is ineffable, or that suffering is a requirement for free will. I find both of those to be incredibly weak arguments. Even if I came to the logical conclusion that there was a god, how would I know what he wanted?

Morality

Morality has always been a difficult subject for me, mostly because it's hard to build from base principles. Most of the time, I just do like society tells me to, or follow my own particular compulsions. There's also a difference between what I think is morally right and what I feel to be right - a difference that I think is accounted for by the contrast between how I was raised and what an intellectual working through of things produces.

So if you start with the foundation laid down in the philosophy section, namely that existence is ultimately arbitrary and moral absolutes don't exist, where do you go from there? This is the basic problem with any atheistic stance. Trying to reconcile this brings people to many different conclusions. Evolutionary ethics says that we should do what we're programed to do. An ethical egoist would say that we should do what's in our best self interest. A humanist would say that we should what's best for humans.

Objectivism starts with "You have chosen to be alive" as its founding principle, and works up from there. I've been thinking about this lately, mostly as a result of playing Bioshock and idly thinking about rereading The Fountainhead before remembering how much I hated it. At any rate, we choose to live, and we have to accept that choice as moral because without it, we're left with nonexistence. The decision to live is therefor presumptively privileged over not living.

The problem with this is that there are a huge host of situations where choosing your own life is clearly the wrong choice. A hypothetical situation would be choosing to add several years onto your own life in exchange for the murder of a few hundred other people. A system of morality that lacks empathy can only really work in the context of a totalitarian society, because utterly selfish people would naturally start to work against each other.

So when I think about the statement "You have chosen to be alive", I have to modify it somewhat, because "alive" is a somewhat stupid term. There are things that we would say are alive which are incapable of thought (and therefore choice). There are also things that I would consider capable of thinking but which are also not alive, such as a hypothetical computer simulation of the human brain. So in substitute for "alive", I need to insert something else - like "conscious". But the statement then becomes strictly untrue, because at least once a day I choose to sleep and lose consciousness.

You can probably see where I'm going with this. If I accept that particular discontinuity, then why shouldn't I accept others? Hypothetically, if I were able to destructively upload my brain into a computer, there might be no more of a discontinuity between that existence and sleep. The person who wakes up the next day is more like another instance of the same person than a strict continuity, especially given how much goes on in the brain during sleep that's completely outside of any conscious control. And yet these different instances don't engage in sabotage (like, say, living for the moment instead of the long term). It's a little odd to think of myself as a series of people, but I think it's instructive. The phrase above becomes not "You choose to live" but "You choose to be conscious when it's viable and it won't harm the collective". This is something that I can accept as fundamentally true, because that's the result of the conditions that I find myself in.

Mostly this is my attempt to reconcile the jump from "Care about yourself" to "Care about others". I don't think it logically works.

What I Believe: Part 1

2010-04-07T22:26:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I figured it's time that I set about on a new project, besides the 652 project. The title should be pretty self-explanatory, but here are the reasons that I'm embarking on it. First, this serves as a sort of time capsule for me. In five to ten years, I'll be able to look back on this series of posts and figure out who I was. Everything I've put on the net has been a sort of time capsule for me; even now, there's a distinct thrill in calling up old articles to see what I thought. The second reason is that it'll help me to figure out what it is that I actually believe. I've long agreed with Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living. So the third reason is that once I have all this down in writing, I can take quick mental shortcuts, or look things up instead of having to actually think.

Philosophy

Let's start with my axioms. In parentheses are the philosophical concepts that are most closely related to those beliefs. This whole section also comes from the caveat that I generally think philosophy is a bunch of wankery full of useless distinctions.

1. Reality exists. (Philosophical Realism)

2. I exist. (Cogito ergo sum)

3. My memory and senses are mostly reliable. (Critical Realism)

4. Logic is infallible. (Rationalism)

Of those, I think maybe number 4 needs the most explanation. Logic gets a bad rap, mostly because of Spock. Logic isn't absolutely opposed to emotion, and I'm not saying that it's the king of decision making. But logic, as a system, absolutely cannot fail. If A = B, and B = C, then A = C. There are obviously things that can't be proven logically (see Gödel's incompleteness theorems), but the basic axiomatic statement I'm making is that things, once established, do not change unless you got it wrong the first time (which is very probable).

From 3 and 4, I get another theory; that a combination of senses and logic can actually tell me things about the world (Empiricism) (5). (From there comes a disbelief in a large number of things, which are mostly defined by their innate inability to be proven, such as miracles and supernatural forces. If something supernatural were able to be explained by science, then it would cease to be supernatural. Nonexistence is one of those things that can't always be disproven.)

Eventually a study of existence seems to reveal (to me) that the whole of it is made up of stuff (energy, matter, etc.) which follows laws (Metaphysical naturalism) (6). This would imply that things happen because of prior events, including conscious choices (Determinism) (7). It would also imply that consciousness itself is somehow physical in nature (Materialism) (8).

In summation: free will is an illusion, consciousness is some kind of emergent phenomenom, and the universe is composed entirely of things which are natural and driven upon laws which are likewise natural. There are some other philosophical questions to which I also hold beliefs, but which are somewhat less connected to the main axioms and derived truths.

1. The strong Church-Turing thesis is true.

2. My experience of consciousness is roughly equivalent to the experience of consciousness as experienced by other people.

3. I exist as the end result of mostly randomness.

4. Reality as we know it is (probably) virtual.

5. There are no moral absolutes.

Upcoming parts will probably include Morality, Spirituality, and Politics.

Videogame Meta-narratives

2010-04-06T08:01:00.000-07:00

Alright, so I just got done with Assassin's Creed, and while jumping across the rooftops of Damascus and stabbing people in the throat is great fun, what I found really interesting is the story.

Spoilers Follow for Assassin's Creed and Bioshock

The story in Assassin's Creed is about a guy wandering through the 12th century holy land and killing lots of bad guys. This is where about 90% of the game takes place. The frame story, on the other hand, takes place in the modern day; a twenty-five year old shut-in is reliving the genetic memories of his ancestor. While frame stories aren't at all uncommon in literature (Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights, Frankenstein) or movies (The Usual Suspects, The Princess Bride) or television (How I Met Your Mother), you don't see them much in videogames.

This is a real shame, because having a narrative frame adds a lot to the interactivity. Videogames have never been real big on immersion for two reasons; first, the user-interface gets in the way, and second, the player is in at least partial control. Adding a frame narrative can solve some of those problems. So in Assassin's Creed, the reason you have a UI is that Desmond needs a UI to pilot the memory program. If you see a glitch, or something that's unrealistic, you can justify it as a side effect of the memory-reliving machine. This is used a few times in the second game, where the instruction manual or other characters talk about flaws in their memory-reliving machine that were fixed this time. For example, in the first game it was impossible to swim, which is chalked up to being a bug. The dialog sometimes shifts into full-blown Italian (the sequel takes place in Italy) which is again an "unintended" effect of the translation software.

Penning in a meta-narrative is a very post-modern thing to do. It's not enough to just present the story, there's a real need to present the story in such a way that we acknowledge that it's a story. Everything has to be done with a wink and a nod, because irony is hip now, and the worst thing that you can do is be earnest about your story. If done well, the effect can be great, as it allows a deeper immersion. All of the artifacts of story-telling - small casts, synchronicity, production constraints, symbolism - are present because it's a story, so is it really so implausible that our lead character is named Hiro Protagonist, or that it turns out that a series of coincidences have led to the killer being the main character's long lost father? Metanarratives excuse inherent artificiality with a wink and a nod.

Ubisoft must like this conceit, because they've used it twice; Prince of Persia basically takes the form of the Prince recounting his adventure to someone. In a similar way to Assassin's Creed, you're playing through a memory. Only this time, story you're playing through is a story. When you die in Prince of Persia, you hear the Prince say, "No no, that's not how it happened, let me start over." and you reappear at the last checkpoint. From a narrative standpoint, I think this is better than having your previous progress undone and reset to an arbitary place without comment or explanation.

(Incidentally, I think that this is one of the funniest parts of Prince of Persia, because it means that - depending on how you play - he's one of the worst story-tellers of all time. "And then I swung from a post and fell into a pit of spikes. Wait, that's not how it happened," or "And I was fighting this huge sand monster and he stabbed me through the heart. Wait, that's not how it happened.")

There's another game I played recently, Bioshock, that does something similar. Huge Spoilers Follow. In Bioshock, you're playing a faceless character with no past, similar to many other shooters. Narratively, shooters use this as a way to get the player to associate more closely with the character - it's also one of the reasons that cutscenes have started to be phased out. This started around the introduction of Half Life, because of the greater sense of immersion it allows. Sometimes the player will be forced to watch as something happens, but they'll still be able to move around and be in full control the whole time.

So in Bioshock, you follow the directions of a guy named Atlas, who's trying to get you to kill a guy named Andrew Ryan. There's an Art Deco asthetic, banter about Objectivist philosophy, and some creepy moments. So you finally get to the end of the game and meet Andrew Ryan, and it's revealed to you that you've been under mind control the whole time. The entire linear path of the game was only followed by you because someone was saying code phrases to control you. Then Andrew Ryan tells you to kill him, which you do (in a cutscene) and you gain back your free will through applied science and go to kill the real bad guy (or maybe just the worse guy).

This was all very startling, because as the player you've been doing these things and following these orders because that's what the game wants you to do; if you try to disobey orders, nothing really happens because the game isn't designed for that. Bioshock is completely linear; there's no choice in what events will happen, or in what order they'll happen. In other words, it's sort of the perfect meta-narrative, because it calls attention to the narrative constraints and at the same time justifies them. I would like to see more of this, because it's the sort of thing that helps videogames develop as a medium.

On the other hand, if you're sticking to a meta-narrative, you have to be careful about how you use it. In Bioshock, the last third of the game is somewhat of a letdown, because the game doesn't really change once you have free will. You're still following a voice on a radio down linear levels. And in Assassin's Creed, even when you step out of the Animus, and the UI disappears, Desmond is being controlled from the third person perspective.

Cannibalism

2010-03-23T02:02:00.000-07:00

I've always said that one of the great and terrifying things about the internet is that it allows all of the niche people to find each other. This means chat rooms and message boards that 99% of the population can't relate to, and online stores where you can buy pretty much anything.

Cannibalism, for one reason or another, has never been outlawed in 49 of the 50 states (Idaho being the exception). It's also something that crops up quite a bit in pop culture, usually when there needs to be some way for the antagonist to stand out - see Silence of the Lambs or The Hills Have Eyes. Alternately, there are stories - both fiction and non-fiction - about people who have had to resort to cannibalism to stay alive. Part of the reason I see a business opportunity in cannibalism is that it's one of the few taboos that we have left. If our society has proven anything, it's that we love to break our taboos.

So if you want to sell human flesh for consumption, I see two basic ways to go about it: either you open up a restaurant, or you sell the meat online. But before I go over the benefits and drawbacks to that, let's talk law.

While cannibalism itself might not be illegal, there are a huge host of laws concerning what's to be done with human remains, not to mention food safety laws. What this basically means is that you will need someone legally allowed to handle human remains (a list which includes morticians, policemen, medical examiners, forensic specialists, and other people in the medical field). The other problem is that it's illegal to sell or buy human remains. So a business that is established with just that purpose runs into a little bit of trouble. One of the standard tricks of prostitution is to redefine the service being performed into something else that's of no legal consequence. A masseuse who gives happy endings is being paid for her time, not for the sexual act. This isn't a very convincing argument, but it has kept prostitutes and other sex workers from jail time if the judge is lenient enough. Translating that to the sale of flesh, you would have to advertise it as complimentary to something else - like, say, a free gift that comes with a t-shirt.

So let's say that you want to start a restaurant. Your biggest hurdle is probably finding a location, and once you have one, keeping that location. I imagine that especially at the beginning, public pressure would be on you to move out once people realized what was going on. There would be news stories, protests, etc. In addition to that, you would need more staff - a chef, waiters, that kind of thing - and all of them would have to be okay with the idea of cannibalism and the reality of working with human remains every day. A restaurant also has a physical location, which means that you're cutting yourself off from a large amount of the population. However, there is some precedent in New York, where a chef made cheese out of his wife's breast milk. The New York Department of Health shut that down fairly quickly (and he was just giving it away, not selling it), but you can see the strategy that would have to be taken; the restaurant would sell other dishes as its main product, with the long pig being a specialty to draw in other business.

The other option is the internet. The great thing about the internet is that it's reasonably anonymous, which is why pretty much every dark thought that's ever passed through someone's head has its own private place online. This includes all manner of niche things - this is why Rule 34 exists. Because of the anonymity, people would be able to buy the meat without feeling social stigma for breaking the cannibalism taboo. Because the internet has no physical location, the business would be able to extend across the country, assuming that relevant laws about transporting human remains across state lines could be properly observed. And since it wouldn't have to be in a place with a large population, the business could be incorporated in whichever state has the most lenient laws on human remains.

So here comes the next inevitable question, which you might have been wondering since the beginning of this post: where is this flesh coming from? There are a few options that don't actually involve having someone die. Tumors get removed all the time, and limbs are occasionally unable to be reattached. The problem here is in finding someone who would be willing to sell those things to the company for someone else to eat. I have no doubt that those people exist, but probably not in enough quantity or regularity to base a business off of them. I feel it wouldn't hurt to pursue people with body identity integrity disorder, but again, there's the issue of quantity and regularity. This option is good, because no one can claim that the business is built on death.

A second option is to use flesh grown in labs. Since I'm not a biologist, I can't really speak to how difficult it would be to actually grow muscle (assuming that's what people want to eat). Tengion is already growing artificial organs for transplant. At any rate, it's something that will become easier with time, given that there are a huge number of medical technologies that result from the basic ability to grow parts of people. There would be less of a question about the safety and health issues of eating the meat. It would also remove some of the stigma of cannibalism, because it was never part of a person. However, this is a question of feasibility, because even if it's remotely possible now, it's sure to be damn expensive. In another thirty years, it might be possible to do from a garage.

And finally, we come to dead people. Dead people are a good source of flesh mostly because there are so many of them. Besides, through organ donor programs there are a huge number of people who are willing to promise away parts of their body for no monetary compensation. It's not too ridiculous to believe that people would promise away their flesh in return for a few hundred dollars, especially young people who are strapped for cash. Bringing contracts into the mix also allows for the use of more elaborate legal constructions which help to ensure that no lawsuits are filed against the business. Seeing as organ donation doesn't normally take the edible parts, there could be quite a bit of overlap between the two practices; both of them use parts of the body that would otherwise go to waste, and having them side by side allows for beneficial comparisons.

I think the bigger question here is whether the demand actually exists to support the costs that a business of this nature would entail, but I suppose that's a question that will only be answered when someone makes the effort.

Are people digital or analog?

2010-03-18T23:58:00.000-07:00

So I was watching the latest episode of Caprica, which features a digitized person trapped inside of a computer chip. The computer scientists were talking about why they were unable to make a copy of the chip, and the reason that they come up with is that the chip encodes something analog instead of digital.

But this makes no sense. The whole reason that computer chips work at all is that they're digital in nature; it all comes down to 1s and 0s. Though there were electronic analog computers, they were used mostly for solving problems that were also analog; circuits would be set up to represent hydraulic pressure. There are a huge number of problems with analog computing, which is why we don't use analog computers anymore. A possible fan wank explanation for the show would be that the chips they're using are actually some kind of hypereffective analog device, or that their computer chips run in a way that's completely different from how ours run, or that this computer chip was corrupted in such a way that it behaves in an analog fashion (though this is also stupid). But it brought up an interesting question for me, mostly because the underlying assumption is that people are analog. And I really like interesting questions.

So obviously the question will eventually come down to how the brain works. You might think people are analog simply because they're complex; people certainly seem to be partly irrational*. I know I'm making a large leap here by arguing that people are nothing more than their brains, and that this precludes the possibility of the soul or some kind of other outside force, but that's for another time. As for what neuroscience says about the nature of the brain, my quick Googling of the subject reveals quite a bit of disagreement on that subject. Since I'm not a neuroscientist, obviously my opinion on the subject holds little weight.

However, having a blog is all about making observations that hold no weight, so I'll go ahead with it. The brain is a feedback control mechanism; it has inputs, outputs, does something with them, and "controls" the body. For the purposes of digitization, it almost doesn't matter whether the brain is analog or not. Digitizing something that's analog means a loss of fidelity, but at a certain point that loss is so negligible that it's not worth worrying about. While that point might well hold true for something like music, it's another thing entirely to talk about the very essence of your being rather than something like music (which, because of the way our eardrums communicate with our brain, ends up being digital anyway).

*This is a pun; π is analog, 3.14 is digital. Digital computers, for example, are forced to use approximations, while analog computers could theoretically use the actual irrational numbers (but they can't, because of noise).

Will Google Fiber really help?

2010-03-11T23:17:00.000-08:00

If you're the sort of person who reads this blog, you probably know that Duluth is in the running to become a test city for Google's proposed ultrahighspeed bandwidth test. At first, I really liked the idea of living in a city with 1 gigabit connection speed, aside from the fact that Google has no real experience running a local ISP (they already control huge amounts of fiber across the country, but it's backbone stuff) and a history of privacy violations (though as I've stated before, privacy is overrated).

But my fair city, in one of their many attempts to show their worth, decided to organize an idea contest with $500 dollar prize. Since I'm poor, and I consider myself to be smart, I decided that I would give it a shot. Here's the big problem that I hadn't really considered though; the 1 gigabit speeds would only be local. So if I were communicating with a server here in town, I would get that full experience, but anywhere else in the country would still be roughly the same speed because of the bottlenecks on their end.

The possibilities for ultrahighspeed are immense. High-definition video is what most people think of right off the bat; the high-def you see on YouTube comes in at about 5 Mbps, meaning that it's not even close to the real thing (Blu-ray has a bitrate of 40 Mbps). At 1 Gbps, a whole movie can be downloaded in about four minutes. I'll confess that I've done a little movie pirating, and waiting a couple of hours for DVD quality video is one of the reasons that owning a copy of movies isn't something that's done a lot (either legally or illegally). Fiber would allow a business model where people actually download movies for keeps - though it would probably be hamstrung by DRM. If your speeds are fast enough, there's no real need to ever download the movies in the first place; some large company would have a database table showing which movies you own, and you would be able to watch your movies from any browser with a fast enough connection. But there's not even any reason for notional ownership once you have that technology, because "rental" is instant, especially if the payment scheme is seamless. The paradigm will shift from "ownership" to "access". Movie rental places are already trying to do this, Netflix cheif among them with their on demand service.

Aside from raw content, of which video is definitely the most broadband intensive, the other lure of fiber is that it would allow the use of applications which are currently confined to your operating system. This isn't such a big shift, because most of the time when you "buy software" what you're really buying is a liscence to use the software (depending on your EULA, natch). So when speeds get high enough, you'll buy the lisence without any CDs, DVDs, or downloads, and whenever you want to use the program it's as fast as logging in to check your e-mail. But as stated above, once you're at that point "ownership" is entirely notional, and so you might as well just rent out Final Cut Pro from Apple instead of paying for it normally. This is more or less the de juris reality, which goes counter to how we actually think about application ownership (a traditional EULA specifies no termination date).

Here's the problem with Google Fiber: no matter what town Google chooses, the population won't be large enough for the application and media giants to build the necessary infrastructure. If Duluth receives the contract, will Apple build a new data center here specifically so that Duluthians will be able to download a four-minute high-def movie? Will they modify their existing data centers to push us high-def movies down whatever fiber their own or lease? Apple is perhaps a bad example, because they're in contention with Google, but the point stands; there's too little to gain by catering to a city the size of Duluth. Maybe I'm wrong, and the "last mile" problem is really all there is to it; maybe the huge rights holders will hop on the bandwagon right away. But I'm really curious as to whether this would actually change how we browse.

Free Will

2010-03-05T07:57:00.000-08:00

So free will doesn't exist; it's just a convincing illusion. Here's why.

Scientists have been writing down sets of rules to describe the workings of the universe for as long as there have been scientists. These rules help us extrapolate what will happen next in a given situation, and if those extrapolations turn out to be wrong, the scientists will run to their chalkboards and write down new rules until the whole system of rules conforms to what we know about reality.

So the universe would appear to be rule based; most people will agree to this (in its general form). But if it's true that everything in the universe is rule based, then it also means that people must be based on rules. This goes against what we feel to be true about ourselves. This gut feeling exists, I think, because it's too difficult to extrapolate both our thoughts and our actions. In part this is because the brain's "processing power" is taken up by thinking about the brain when we try to do this, and in part it's because our information about the brain is incomplete in even the best of circumstances (i.e. under an fMRI). Even the best techniques of today can't predict a person's actions at even the most rudimentary level.

If the universe is rule based, then the people that inhabit it must also be rule based, and strict adherence to the rules means that any choice is essentially fated to happen - or, if you buy into some interpretations of quantum mechanics, the "choice" is not under your control but instead the result of electron spin etc. Consciousness itself is an illusion.

Even if things like consciousness and free will are illusory, it doesn't mean that they aren't useful. Obviously the justice system would have to work very differently if people thought that things were not your fault because there is no real "you" to speak of. Our society is founded on the belief that some things matter and others don't, and without these constructs society requires remodeling (especially if morality is itself a construct).

One of the reasons that I don't like writing about philosophical issues is that I'm very aware that they've been rehashed a thousand times before, and that I'm unable to actually add anything to the global, scholarly conversation. I actually feel this way about a lot of things; there are a large number of people who are much smarter than I, and typing away at my computer serves only selfish purposes. But to examine our beliefs requires conversation, and since I have no one to really talk about these things with, it needs to go out to the internet instead.

Political Ideology and Free Will

2010-03-04T21:23:00.000-08:00

So the more I think about it, the more I think that one of the basic differences between liberals and conservatives is a belief in free will. (Disclaimer: liberal and conservative are two labels which don't really map properly as a spectrum of belief, but I'll be talking about two general viewpoints on a number of issues)

I mostly came about this view by thinking about the approach those two camps take to the justice system. The conservative viewpoint on criminal punishment is that it should be punitive; if we make a punishment strong enough and we're "tough on crime", people will stop committing crimes. Criminals lack the willpower to make the right choices. The liberal viewpoint, on the other hand, stresses reformation and changing the person to be different. This is why they tend to be softer; it's not about second chances so much as it is about changing the person into someone who doesn't engage in criminal acts. People can be changed, not through acts of will but by conscious shaping by outside forces.

Another point of contention between liberals and conservatives is what some people would derisively call the "nanny state". This applies to things like gun control, drug enforcement, health insurance, safety protocols, and so on. Free will also explains this difference; liberals believe that people are literally not in control of themselves. Taxes on alcohol and cigarettes and bans on most other addictive drugs result from the belief that addicts are not capable of controlling their actions; the brain is a feedback control mechanism, and restricting the inputs results in different outputs. But for the conservatives, this is more a matter of will - if you don't want to die from lung cancer, you should stop smoking. If you don't want to get fat, stop eating so much. If free will exists, and humans are under their own agency, then these are personal failings rather than the result of outside conditions.

And finally, there comes the issue of gay rights. Liberals would have you believe (in the strong form) that homosexuality is something that you're born with or (in the weak form) something that occurs because of uncontrollable environmental factors. Conservatives will say that it's a choice. What more needs to be said on that issue?

It has long confused me why the conservative cause marries two seemingly different ideologies. Christian conservativism stresses a restriction on immoral things, while the free-market ideologues espouse the theory that people must be free to choose. Why should I be free to pay my workers a fair but unjust amount of money for their work, but not free to buy a magazine with lewd images in it? For me, this seems an inherent contradiction within the party. It seemed at first that there were just two groups that bound themselves together so as not to split the vote, another unsatisfactory result of the two-party system. Then I thought that perhaps this was too cynical, and there had to be some thing which bound them together. I now think that this binding trait might be philosophical.

If free will does not exist, then the market is going to behave in certain ways depending on what all the variables within the market are, and what restrictions are placed on the market by both technologies and governmental interference. In this way, the market is no different than anything else in the universe. It is therefor in the best interests of the people (embodied in the government) to restrict the market in such a way that it does good things for the people (in the form of new technologies, a good distribution of resources, health and safety for workers, etc.) instead of bad things (pollution, child labor, defective products).

However, if free will does exist, then the market is instead determined by how the actors in the market choose to behave. Companies will stop polluting because they are good and honest instead of because they have incentives to stop. If you believe in free will, then I think you almost have to believe that people are by their nature good, or if not that, then at least you must believe that good will prevail in the end. So perhaps the lack of restrictions on the market show that while individuals are not to be trusted in the area of personal choices, large companies are to be trusted on large issues.

Perhaps I'm simplifying the issues too much.

Digital Natives

2010-03-02T05:22:00.000-08:00

So there's this theory that people of my generation have some huge advantage with technology because we were born into it; the buzzword is "digital native". The idea is that because we were exposed to digital technology while growing up, our brains have been wired differently, our neural networks better able to respond to fast visual stimuli.

This isn't bunk - there's some good science behind it - but where this theory fails is in assuming that there's some sort of concrete divide between those who grew up on technology and those who didn't. Technology doesn't work like that. Every single year, advancements are being made in computers. If we work from the assumption that technology actually does alter the mind, and that the brain becomes less plastic as we age, then we also have to pay attention to the fact that the current generation of "young people" have been exposed to vastly different levels of technology throughout their lives.

I was born in 1986, which means that the internet really started to move into full swing when I was 10: 1995 was the year of HTML and the expansion of the true World Wide Web. When I was 15, Google finally came to town, and became the powerhouse of search, starting the slow transformation of the web into a pile of information to be sifted through rather than a series of interlinked pages. During my first year of college, Facebook came out, and social media started to hit it big.

So that's roughly how milestones in technology map to someone my age. But for someone just a few years younger or a few years older, those milestones would look very different by virtue of having different developmental contexts. For someone who's 15 right now, like my cousins, Google has been around for as long as they can read, and social media will be around for their entire high school experience. If we're going so far as to say that technologies cause changes in the brain, are we just going to discount the different contexts of a change in time?

Yet when people, especially those over 30, talk about "digital natives" what they're really referring to is a group of people with different habits from them; habits that they don't really understand, and which they see as less valuable than the status quo. For kids born today, it's very likely that their entire life will be online, pictures of them posted to Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, etc. at every step of their life. We're entering into the era of full recording, where everything you do is accompanied by a stream of data.

I'm not going to mount a defense of the digital lifestyle, mostly because that's a little useless; technology keeps going, and any such defense would have to be constantly updated to explain why new thing X is not so bad. But I can at least look at the recommendations that are being made by those people who would have you believe that the Internet, and everything that comes with it, is a bad thing. This camp puts out fear-based books like iBrain, The Dumbest Generation, and The Cult of the Amateur. These books are written not to help understand young people, but to comfort the old.

The most common thing they suggest is a move away from the internet. If people just spent more time face-to-face, and sat down with each other to have actual conversations, we wouldn't have this problem of narcissism, echo-chambers, amateurism, piracy, or immaturity. The argument, in essence, is this: the old ways worked, why would we change them?

This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of both history and human nature. On the history front: those Baby Boomers who are making these claims grew up in an era of ubiquitous television. There were reactionaries then (and even now) who claimed that television would rot the mind and create a nation of illiterates. When recorded music made its debut, there were people who wondered why anyone would want to listen to something that wasn't live; and when recordings started to become popular, those same people lamented that live music was becoming harder to find. Every time any job is automated, there are those people who seem to think that the amount of work in the world is finite, and that this is a permanent net loss for employment rates.

And yet the world continues on. Any worthwhile technology is unstoppable, because it appeals to people in some way; it increases value, provides entertainment, or makes someone money. Turning back the clock to a "simpler time" is simply impossible, and nearly every reactionary claim about some new technology has proven to be unfounded.

Besides this argument from history, there is this argument from human nature; simply telling people that they shouldn't do something is never enough if that thing has some sort of reward for them. Websites and social media provide a psychological reward, as well as offering utility. Telling people "you would be happier if you stopped" is not good enough; to change people, you need to offer them a stiff punishment or a greater reward. This is why we have taxes, and why we punish people for their crimes.

Here's one of the difficult issues then: there is not some grand committee somewhere deciding how the world will be structured. There is no Council on Technology that decides what will or will not be made, and what will or will not be popular. Instead, the path of technology is built mostly by human nature. Social media are evolving along the dual lines customer satisfaction and profitability. Profitability, in almost all cases, comes from advertising, which is itself built around human nature; getting people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do.

And if advertising has taught us anything, it's that getting people to change their habits is usually something that needs to be accomplished by offering them rewards or punishments. So if you feel that people are going down the wrong path, the best way to convince them of the error of their ways is to set up a different system of thought that's more rewarding.

The Future of Narcissism

2010-03-01T19:46:00.000-08:00

Alright, so my old friend Travis necroed a note I had posted on Facebook some four years ago about the disposability of content in the modern age. Because it was short, here's the entire thing note reposted:

Most people don't realize this, but we live in what used to be called the future.

Don't believe me? It's true. Historians are already prematurely calling this the Digital Age, because it can at times seem like the whole world is online and connected to your fingertips. Since we've officially entered into the Web 2.0 (that's a buzzword that you can show off to your boss with) era, there's been a massive outpouring of words, pictures, and videos of all shapes and sizes.

The problem I have with this is two-fold.

First, the signal to noise ratio has risen to stratospheric levels. For every piece of useful information, there are a hundred pictures of someone's cat. For every scrap of genuine human insight, there are a hundred teenage girls bitching about a hundred other teenage girls. It's sometimes possible to tell at first glance what is and what isn't time-wasting garbage, but the general clues of misspelled words and poor web-formatting aren't always enough.

Second, our digital medium has a very poor staying power, if any. There was a time in human history when everything that was written down was important, because writing itself was expensive. Papyrus kept well, and can still be read today, whereas our computers don't come with floppy drives anymore, and the term paper you wrote last semester can't be opened on your new computer. If your parents made a Betamax home movie, chances are it would be incredibly difficult for you to find a way to play it.

It may not matter to you now, but this era in human history, this Digital Age, is leaving nothing of cultural value behind. There will be too much sewage for the historians to wade through, and the cost of reviving old technology from the dead will be too much work. This is, perhaps, the cost of cultural technology; because everyone can be heard, no one can be heard; because it is easy to create, it is easy to lose.

(Everything from this blog is auto-imported into Facebook, and Google Buzz. If you're reading this post at one of those places, this is your warning: I like to talk about things that aren't really all that interesting.)

Anyway, in some hypothetical future where human society has collapsed and been rebuilt, and future historians/anthropologists/archeologists are looking through the remains of our society, they're going to run into a few problems, as stated above. Hardware and software keep shifting through phases of adoption and obsolescence, which means that the effective lifespan of any digital work isn't really all that long - even if it's still on a disk, the odds of the software and hardware supporting that file on that medium get lower and lower with every year.

But the other problem with time as it relates to digital media is that there are some hard limits on how long that stuff can even last. Here are some figures pulled from around the net:

Magnetic tape (VHS): 25 years
Optical media (CD/DVD): 100-200 years
Solid state (flash drives): 10 years
Paper: 100s of years
Plastic: indefinite

(Sources here, here, here, and here.)

Now obviously there are a huge number of considerations involved in "how long something lasts". When I say that paper lasts for hundreds of years, that assumes ideal conditions: dry, cool, microbe-free environments, with acid-free paper. And for many of the things on that list, the time for decomposition is longer than the actual product in question has existed (I'm older than the DVD). In a way, that list is pretty pointless.

So what the future historians find will depend on how far into the future they are, and the extent of the destruction caused by whatever it was that wiped out all of the people. If they're a hundred years in the future, our history will be a strange sort of patchwork to them, the surviving evidence being a patchwork of discs and plastics. They'll be able to see all our movies and music, but none of our blogs and websites but whatever's been printed out. Of course, I have been known to underestimate the tenacity of those in the "soft sciences". It's also possible that someone will finally invent fast than light travel, move ahead of the outgoing radio signals, and learn about the past by intercepting those transmissions (or without FTL, waiting for lucky signals to bounce off comets/asteroids/etc.).

Regardless of all that, my original point was about what they would find if they got access to a random sampling of all this information being produced by us. The answer, of course, is that they would get a giant load of irrelevant crap; part of the reason there's so much data floating around is that we, as a society, are falling further and further into the well of personalized content. This is standard long-tail distribution stuff; because it's free to read and write online, there's been a huge explosion of stuff. If you like model trains, you can find a whole host of websites, blogs, and forums dedicated to that one thing. The same goes for pretty much any subject on the face of the planet.

All of this is only really feasible because of search. Without search, the huge amount of data would be a confusing mess of hyperlinks. With it, the mess gets organized around whatever it is you were looking for.

That's all well and good, and there are many who would argue that this mess is the path to enlightenment. But the other side of this glut of information is that people isolate themselves into their particular interests, creating echo chambers that lock them out from the rest of the world. This has always happened, but online (where the vast majority of discourse takes place) the long tail (mostly) eliminates the need for conversational compromise.

That's where narcissism comes into play. On the web, you don't have to change anything about yourself, because you will always be able to find people who like you just the way you are. You can spew out whatever is on your mind, and odds are that at least a few people will find it interesting enough to read. In this way, people get turned in on themselves.

But this isn't anywhere near the endgame for narcissism. As I've theorized in my post The Future Will Be Customized, there will come a time in the future when pretty much bit of media that you consume will be generated by artificial intelligence, synthesized to your preferences. This is a natural extension of long-tail dynamics; instead of stopping at a certain level of "nicheness", the tail continues on forever, until works are being produced that appeal to only a single person. It will happen because it's possible, and because there are economic/social/cultural benefits at every step of the process towards getting there.

So historians who will be looking at the future that hasn't happened yet will see a widening of media until it comes to the point of oblivion. Eventually, reading a novel will tell you far more about the person it was crafted for than it will about the society that person inhabits. This also extends beyond the realm of fiction; Google News already gives me a customized feed of information that's tailored to what stories I've read in the past, gradually building up a news narrative specifically tailored to me.

This is the end game. People surround themselves with the world they think they want, cut off from everything that doesn't give a positive feedback. The machines don't take over through strength of arms or by holding our technology hostage, but instead by giving us exactly what we want.

Exploiting Multi Universe Time Travel

2010-01-31T19:16:00.000-08:00

Let's say you're in a nondescript room with a box that can move things backwards in time. Every hour, on the hour, it moves whatever is in it to fifteen minutes ago, but offset by a few meters so that in ends up in a different box (the boxes are labeled). You have a thousand dollars.

In the stable-time-loop model of time travel, it is impossible for you to make money. It's also impossible for you to make any changes at all, and is therefor only interesting insofar as it allows audiences to make observations about free will. This is the model used by The Time Traveller's Wife, Terminator, and Twelve Monkeys.

In the multiverse model, each instance of travelling back in time spawns a new universe (a brief note on terminology: when I say universe, I actually mean cosmos, because the universe by definition everything. When I say multiverse, I mean the collection of all cosmoses.) Given what you have in the world, it's technically possible to make money, but you would never do it.

Here is the stupid plan: put the money in the time travel box (from now on, T-box), and when it hits the hour, it'll be sent fifteen minutes backwards to the recipient box (R-box). But then, when the money comes into the R-box, you run back over to the T-box and pull that money out before it can be sent back, leaving you with twice as much money. This would seem to create a paradox, but since we're actually dealing with different universes, there's you-A in universe-A with no money, and you-B in universe-B with double the money.

First, this plan is stupid because it redistributes the money in a stupid way. Marginal utility says that you-A will be a lot less happy with not having the money than you-B will be with having twice the money. This is why you should never make a 50/50 bet at 2:1 payoff.

Second, it won't work because there's no incentive for you-A. He'll see that there's not any money in the R-box, so he'll pull his money out of the T-box before it disappears forever. Which means that there's never going to be a universe-B, or (depending on how the T-box works) universe-B won't be much different from universe-A.

There are a few ways to circumvent this; the first, if you're comfortable with yourself, is to just cilmb into the T-box and wind up in universe-B R-box. Of course, making a profit this way is difficult, because you'd only be able to take as much stuff with you as would fit in the box, and you would have to share an identity with the other you. The various benefits include being able to halve your rent, having someone to play co-op games on the Xbox with, and being able to work phenomenol hours in comparison with the rest of the workforce.

The second circumvention method is to send information back in time. Since information is practically free (for small amounts, you only need a pencil and paper, and you get to keep the pencil when you're done), it's something that you would do without any incentive - unlike the example wherein you waste $1000, it has some chance of actually happening. The real problem is finding some bit of information that's worth more 15 minutes ago than it is at the time the T-box activates.

And here's where we have to take the thought experiment outside the idyllic realm of nondescript rooms and boxes. The first thought that comes to mind is lottery tickets. Fifteen minutes isn't a long enough time, because a play on any of the numbered lottos rolls over to the next week more than fifteen minutes prior to the drawing (generally one to two hours before the drawing, depending on what state you live in). However, a similar effect can be achieved with the use of scratch-off games. Your course of events would look something like this:

1) Wait by the R-box to see if any tickets come back. If they do, go to step 8.
2a) Run to the nearest gas station and buy some scratch-off tickets (if you're too far away from one, you can coordinate this by phone with another person).
3a) Record all the numbers on the cards.
4a) Have the employee run them through to see if you've won (this is faster than actually using a penny and checking for yourself).
5a) Make a note of the winning numbers.
6a) Put the sheet of paper with your records in the T-box.

2b) Take the sheet of results to the nearest gas station.
3b) Only buy the winning tickets (most clerks, if it's not busy, will let you buy scratch cards out of sequence, especially if you act really superstitious)
4b) Profit!

Of course this plan requires some initial investment money, because you have to actually play the cards to know what they contain. However, you've given yourself a huge edge, because for each time you use this system there's a 50% chance that you'll be able to skip the whole "losing" part of gambling. However, most of us would be willing to spend $3 on a

But we can actually increase those odds considerably, because step 4b is a really stupid step. At that point, you should have two things: a sheet that tells you which tickets to buy and some amount of cash. One of those things is now worthless to you. Here is our replacement step:

4b) Put the sheet of paper with your records in the T-box.

What happens now is that instead of two universes, one in which you gamble and one in which you win without gambling, there are a nearly infinite number of universes. In one of those, you gamble, while in the other infinitude of universes you win without gambling. This means that for any time you try this system, it's a freak occurrence for you to actually have to gamble, because all the versions of you on the b-track outnumber the single version of you on the a-track.

(Note that step 4b should be moved down to 5b, and the new step 4b should be something like "If the piece of paper is getting unreadable, write all the numbers down on a new sheet of paper and put that one in the T-box". You'll note that if those steps were followed as is, the piece of paper would still be aging with every cycle. A million cycles of 15 minutes is about 30 years. By copying the information onto a new sheet of paper, you can ensure that information is the only thing traveling. Of course, then you get into the problem of transcription errors, but whether that would actually happen depends on what you believe about the universe as far as chaos theory and quantum mechanics goes - whether the physical laws mean that things are predetermined, and how quickly events diverge.)

So using a single player, with a highly restrictive time machine, the best method of exploit is to send information back to yourself, especially if there's minimal cost associated with that information. Time to expand the scope. Let's say someone else finds this room, works out the principles of how this mysterious box works, and turns it into just another piece of consumer electronics, which can translate anything of any size to another time and place.

Lotteries would immediately stop, as would most other games of chance, because the house edge would absolutely evaporate. The stock market would most likely stop serving any useful function, because information from the future would (in almost all realities) be flooding in. A large number of information services would fold, because it's only necessary to pay for an application once, at which point you simply send the source code back to before you paid for someone to create it. Crime would be stopped before it happened, because the date and time of nearly every murder, theft, arson, etc. would be known beforehand. There would also be a mass exodus to the past, where information about the future is even more valuable than in the present, and the further back you go the easier it is to fake an identity.

Of course, this assumes a reality which has experienced more instances of time travel than the initial reality. Arranged left to right, we could order these universes in order of causality, with the leftmost universe having been the root cause of time travel and having never actually experienced anything coming from the future, and the rightmost universe being one in which nothing has ever actually travelled to the past because every attempt has been interrupted by people from the future.

The impossibility of time travel has often been disputed with the simple fact that if it were possible, we would be knee deep in people from the future. However, in this model, we can clearly see that this doesn't prove anything; it merely means that we find ourselves in a universe further to the left.

The Wierd Inversions of Singularity Fiction

2010-01-26T13:59:00.000-08:00

Alright, first a definition of terms: the Singularity is sort of the Geekpocalypse. Only instead of dying, or going to heaven, we all become super intelligent and transcend into almost unimaginable beings of immense power. Supposedly, this will happen because of a large number of advances in technology - brain uploading, artificial intelligence, nanotech, bioengineering, etc. It will be incomprehensible to us in the same way that the Pythagorean Theorm is incomprehensible to a dog.

Personally, I'm sort of a soft believer in the Singularity. This whole concept of exponential growth is all well and good, but it requires a little too much faith for my tastes. The truth is, there's so much we don't know about consciousness. There are also hard limits on technological progress, which means that what looks like an exponential curve must actually be an S-curve. There's also a question of economics; it might be that AI is possible, but that we'll never reach the point where it's actually pursued. Or AI will take a lot of time to make better AI, so instead of an intelligence spike, it's a gradual upwards slide, and there's no future shock, just slow and steady progress. Or we might blow ourselves up, or get hit by an asteroid, or exterminated by extraterrestrials. All that aside, we do seem on track to be hitting some serious boosts in technology if the next hundred years are anything like the last hundred.

Anyway, I've been reading a lot of science fiction recently, much of it focused on the Singularity. There's a weird theme running through these books; as technology progresses, civilization starts to regress.

For some reason, governments start to melt away or dissolve completely. Instead, you have the ungovs of Marooned in Realtime, the phyles of The Diamond Age, and the synthetic groupings of Accelerando. The reasons for this breakdown varies. Either the government is too big and slow, or the corporations gradually take over, or the system of taxation becomes infeasible. Some authors take it farther than others - sometimes the future is only of companies and their shifting alliances, and sometimes it's nothing more than independent agents, connected to other people only through tenuous agreements. Society becomes tribal once again, only this time humans - and our descendants - don't move through the plains or forests, but through the sea of humanity.

Another throwback is currency. Historically, we moved from barter, to backed currencies, to fiat currencies. In Singularity fiction, this also warrants a regression; typically this comes in the form of reputation markets, where people spend goodwill (basically, their upvotes). That system seems really dumb to me, primarily because it needs the same sort of belief supporting it that fiat currency does. Only instead of being under the control of government, that wonderful institution whose primary occupation is existing, it would have to be under control of a private corporation with a risk of folding. The other two dominant narratives are an information currency (in Accelerando they use computerized people) or a return to barter (on the theory that computerization can eliminate all the costs associated with that). Barter makes a lot of sense if you've already postulated that civilization is doomed - you have to trade in things with actual value, and anything that's useful can't very well be put into wide circulation, and if you're using something without intrinsic value as your currency, then you're basically using a currency founded on belief anyway.

Okay, so why do the writers choose to do it this way? First and foremost, I should point out that a writer can only be so clever. That's why if you read (bad) detective fiction, the detective solves easy problems and everyone pretends that they're hard. Most hard scifi writers aren't geniuses; they read scientific papers, look at trends, and then try to write an interesting story that's within the bounds of reality. So perhaps the reason that systems seem to be regressing is that we don't really know what form civilization might take. A monarchy is at least easy to understand.

I guess the other reason this happens is that it provides a nice sort of mirroring effect; humanity moves from tribes to kingdoms to nation-states, then back downwards until we are tribes once more. It has a certain irony to it.

The Future Will Be Customized

2010-01-12T11:05:00.000-08:00

The archaic model of production was artisan based. If you wanted shoes, you went to a cobbler, who would take measurements of your feet, and a few days later you would come back to pick up your order. If you were poor, you would buy shoes secondhand, or just go barefoot.

The old model is mass production, of the "any color so long as it's black" variety. Eventually this becomes something more like "any color so long as it's black, blue, or green", which gives enough variety for possessions to be relatively distinct, especially since the added cost of something like different colors is trivial. The stuff that actually has to be engineered requires larger costs, and so won't be made unless it has a large enough market.

Eventually a variety of technologies come together to vastly expand available markets and greatly lower the cost to enter those markets, which leads to the current model - long-tail distribution. iTunes can sell not just the big hits (like a physical music store would have to) but really obscure songs that only a hundred people would want to buy. They can do this because the cost of having a song in the store (because of smart searching and digital hierarchies) is practically nothing. In the same way, anyone can start up a website and start selling something, with a cost of about $50, and the search and delivery infrastructures mean that it can actually be worth their while. This leads to things like etsy.com, where people can (for virtually no cost) put their wares online and sell them. Instead of profit being located exclusively at the head of our market size graph, it exists further and further down the tail. Note that this model works better for things that don't require huge amounts of capital to produce, like works of art or small consumer goods. Something like a car still requires a factory, so you're less likely to be able to buy something exclusively suited to you.

The long-tail distribution of goods represents the direction for the future. Production costs for nearly everything are falling, due to improvements in technology. There are two technologies coming down the pipeline, whether it be ten years from now or a hundred, that will drop those costs to practically zero. Those two are artificial intelligence and nanotechnology.

Artificial intelligence will allow the dynamic generation of pure information commodities; books, movies, music, software, and so on. Once those abilities are up to the point of being able to match human quality a large number of things will happen, but one of the biggest will be the near-infinite extension of the long tail. Right now it's not uncommon to find books that only a handful of people read. But with hard AI, there will be books only read by one person; custom crafted to that person's tastes. In the same way that Amazon takes in all of your reviews, rating, and prior purchases to suggest things that you might like, an AI would be able to take in all of that information to create an entirely new work. Alternately, large commercial works would be able to build variability into their pieces - a comedic movie would be able to respond to the audience's laughter in the way a stage production can, for example. This complete customization applies not just to information goods, but services as well. Instead of sitting in a classroom with thirty other students, you would be able to sit in front of your media center and learn from an AI program which customizes itself to your individual needs and learning style.

Nanotechnology means pretty much the same thing for physical goods. In the science fiction version, this means a powder that transforms nearly anything into nearly anything else, usually by rearranging protons, neutrons, and electrons. That's a long way away; in the short run, nanotechnology means that nearly anything will be able to be produced as a one-of. We can do some of this now with 3D printers, assuming that you want to make something out of plastic and at a fairly low resolution. As time goes on, the resolution will keep getting better, and mixed materials will become available. Since information is the only important input, the same rules that will apply to things like movies and books will start to apply to physical things like cars, dinner plates, and so one. Instead of buying a car from a dealership, you'll go to a dealership (or a large rapid production facility), have an AI figure out what your needs and desires are, and custom make a vehicle for you. The same thing will happen to larger things like houses, as nearly all aspects of home construction will be outsourced to cheap AI and robotics. Instead of finding a house suited to you, one will be custom built.

In the future, when this technology comes around - whether that's twenty or a hundred years away - nearly everything will be made on a case by case basis. Everything that you wear, watch, and use will be custom made. The complications that arise from this are numerous; there's already been talk that with the availability of the internet, people are segregating themselves into diverse groups, reducing our ability to get along as a society. When we no longer have even our mass produced goods in common, and a culture of one, what happens then?

Everything Wrong with Terminator Salvation

2009-12-18T10:28:00.000-08:00

Alright, so I just got done watching all of the Terminator movies nearly in a row, and there is so much about the fourth movie that bugs me. So this is why I have a blog.

I've always been of the opinion that plot holes should always be thought through first, to see if they're really plot holes or not. Here's the only way that the events of T4 make sense; Skynet is really stupid. Now I don't just mean stupid as in "unintelligent", more stupid "idiot savant". It's really good at some things, and really bad at other things.

For example: the terminators are really bad at firing weapons - even worse than people. Ballistics were one of the first things that computing power was turned to, because it's one of those things that's pretty much all about calculation and not about higher thinking. In World War II soliders would consult artillery tables - which were created by human computers. Somehow, the terminator method of firing is about pointing the gun in the general direction of the target and firing a huge number of rounds. They're armed with miniguns, for god's sake. Why not something with precision? Because Skynet is stupid, that's why. It gets even worse when they don't have a weapon, because their default method of attack is to throw people. People can survive being thrown, as happens numerous times throughout the series. What they can't survive is a fist through their skull. Again, this is Skynet being stupid. Even if we accept that the servos suck (which is what gives them the jerky robot look in the first place) it should still be possible to snap someone's neck, or jerk them violently from side to side like a dog (producing the same result), or at least throw those people at something hard.

There are also significant problems with time travel. It's outright stated that both sides know time travel will exist at some point in the future, even if the tech isn't available quite yet. Here's the problem: it should only require an incredibly simple test to figure out what kind of time travel rules the universe uses. The problem is, in none of the established rulesets for time travel does it make sense to send people back to create a new outcome for you. If you're using stable time loop rules, then changing the past is impossible, and it's a waste of resources to attempt it. If you're using multiverse rules, then it only makes sense to change the past from the persepective of the traveller, which means that time travel is again pretty useless in a war. If you're using single universe overwrite rules ... well, then it might make sense, but sending someone (or thing) back is tantamount to suicide. So in short, there's pretty much no circumstance in which using time travel is actually a good idea.

Here's another problem I have; why is Skynet not using nukes? It's explicit that Skynet has control of nuclear power, and that nukes have been used on the rest of the world, but for some reason when it comes time to fight the Resistance Skynet holds back. Since radio signals are blaring out every time Conner gives one of his speeches, it should be a simple matter to triangulate his position (or failing that, at least to track down his transmitters one by one). Even if Skynet is locked out of nukes, they should still be able to develop rodding technology, or slam nonessential satellites into whatever target they need to hit. If you're fighting a war with absolutely no regard for collateral damage, exterminating humanity should be fairly easy.

Here's another tactical problem; why does Skynet have a headquarters? I can maybe understand it from a manufacturing standpoint, but there's no reason for Skynet to retain centralization. This goes double when your manufacturing plant is filled with high explosives. Command should be completely decentralized, or at least in cells, research should take place in one location, and manufacturing should take place in another.

Also, why isn't Skynet saturating the area with mustard gas, neurotoxins, or some other form of biowarfare?

Also, why do their bots have USB plug-ins at all?

Okay, rant over.

The Geometry of D&D

2009-12-07T18:30:00.000-08:00

Alright, this post is about both D&D and math; that's your cue to click over to some other tab or window before you get bored to death.

4th edition D&D uses non-Euclidean spaces to simplify combat. Rules-wise, this means that moving along the diagonal counts as the same distance as moving vertically or horizontally on the battle mat. If you know anything about math, you will quickly realize that this is stupid; moving five feet along the x axis and then five feet along the y axis does not make you five feet away from the origin - it makes you the square root of 50 away from the origin (about 7 feet and some change).

What this means is that everything is completely wonky when you extrapolate for a little bit. Take, for example, travel times. To your left you will find a handy MSPaint map, showing the settlements of Aberforth, Baelish, and Codwyn. Now then, the distance between these towns can't actually be determined by looking at where they are on the map. Instead, you need another piece of information - which direction is the grid of the world is aligned?

If the grid runs due north, then Baelish is twice as far away from Aberforth as Codwyn. In fact, it takes just as long for me to go to Baelish whether I travel through Codwyn or take the direct route. That's because there is no single direct route; so long as I'm moving up the y-axis (aka north), it doesn't matter where I am on the x-axis (aka east and west). This means that if you're traveling from one point to another, and the line between points is aligned to the battle grid, the shortest distance between two points is not the single solution it is in the real world (a line) but a whole host of solutions which are confined to a square with one corner at your destination and one corner at your origin.

However, if the grid were to be rotated 45 degrees, to be pointing north-east, the distances between the towns change dramatically. At this alignment, Aberforth, Baelish, and Codwyn are all equidistant from each other. That's right - they now form an equilateral triangle, albiet not one that's equiangular. We now have the opposite problem we had before; the shortest distance between two points which are 45 degrees offset from the grid is, in fact, a straight line - and any deviation from that straight line takes comparatively long than a real-world deviation.

This is weird; geometry now depends not only on angles and distances, but alignment to the grid as well. In our ABC triangle, the AB side can shrink by half depending on which way the grid is aligned.

Let's take another example; let's say you're standing in the center of a 25ft. x 25ft. room. In the real world, the corners are further away than the sides. But in D&D world, every point on the wall is equidistant. Some thought on the matter will reveal that this doesn't describe a square, but a circle; a circle is composed of those points which are equidistant from the center. But again, this depends on how the grid is aligned. A square offset from the grid would translate more properly into a four-pointed star; the sides are all bowed in.

Imagine that you built a box that spun in D&D world. As it went through its rotation, its alignment to the grid would change, causing the physical properties of the box to change as well. At full alignment, the inside observer would see the walls as a circle; as the box kept turning, the walls would start to shrink inwards, until the box resembled more of a box - at which point it would keep going, the walls bending inwards until there was less than a quarter the original space, the corners seemingly distant.

Of course, it's likely that the observer would be undergoing similar effects, so it would probably just work out to be a not-too-exciting spinning cube. Sadly, I lack the higher math to figure out more of this world; if you happen to have high level math that can help me, post a comment.

The Economics of D&D

2009-11-07T13:57:00.000-08:00

Note: if you're reading this on Facebook, keep in mind that it's imported from my blog, "Things Which Bore People", which is exactly what it sounds like.

There really isn't such a thing as economics in D&D. All items are given a static price, regardless of scarcity. For example, a player couldn't buy up all of the suits of magical armor in a large city then sell them at a profit because they have a monopoly. This is basic gameplay/story segregation, because having to keep track of supply and demand in a fantasy world doesn't really add anything to the game. That said, it's something that still bothers me, because there are some underlying assumptions about the world that it should logically affect.

For example, why are there farmers? The rulebooks have two different spells to make food; "Traveler's Feast", which provides food for five people for 24 hours with a cost of 35gp, and "Bloom" which causes crops to bear fruit, which feeds five people for a week with a cost of 20gp. In the medieval era, even going into the early modern era, the vast majority of the population worked at farming. This can't be the case in D&D, unless labor is worth a lot less; the only reason there would be farmers is if buying the food would cost less than conjuring some up, which would only be the case if farm labor were worth practically nothing. "Bloom" takes 10 minutes to cast, and feeds five people for a week. The labor of five farmers who are working for a week must then be worth less than the 20gp it costs for the spell, which means that they must individually be earning around 1gp for every two days of work (5sp). This doesn't make a whole lot of sense in comparison to how much things cost, unless the players are getting insanely gouged by everyone they meet (which, rules-as-written, they are, but not to that extent).

There are a couple of ways to reconcile this; the first is to make magic really rare, so that it doesn't affect much of the mundane happenings. This doesn't do much for a variety of other problems - bringing back a dragon's hoard should still make prices shoot through the roof as gold is devalued.

That brings us to the second solution; create an elaborate spreadsheet attached to a random number generator which will alter prices based on a variety of factors. This is better, but the amount of work it would require compared to how much it would improve the game means that it's not really worth it.

A third solution is to alter your game world to make most of the logical problems go away; it wouldn't make sense for there to be farmers, so there aren't. Unfortunately, this has a tendency to reduce a setting to magitek, because these people would be using magic like we use technology. The industrialized world has less than a half of a percent of its population working farms, because the technology saves on labor. The rest of the economy would focus on industry, entertainment, and war (as it does now) - and healthcare would be even better than in the real world.

But what I've decided to do this time around is to compensate for the players. Basically, the players bring in a lot of money, which causes inflation. But at the same time, magic is advancing, which increases productivity, which causes deflation. It will work out to be the case that inflation and deflation keep exact pace with each other, which means that the prices listed in the books don't have to be altered. And in this way, the players will see the world change around them; when they're level 1, a +1 magic sword will be a fairly rare thing, but when they're level 10 a +1 magic sword will be a weapon weilded by commoners. So basically, the players will be living through their own version of the Industrial Revolution, and while their growth in power will outpace the world's, it won't be a case of quadratic expansion against a static realm. Hopefully this will help my suspension of disbelief.

RPG + Exercise

2009-11-04T08:29:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I was talking with Anni and Alyssa about what would motivate me to exercise, and I decided that what would work best is some way of tying my use of the internet to an exercise bike. Anni suggested that I just tie it to the power supply, but I don't like that for a number of reasons - what would ideally happen is that I would have a stationary bike with something that counts the number of revolutions, and then tie that into Firefox with some kind of mod, so that going anywhere on the internet requires a certain amount of cycling. Well that's all well and good, and would make an interesting project if I had the time and money to do it, but it led me to an even better idea: a combination gym and RPG.

In its simplest form, the RPGym would just be a series of Achievements or Rewards, so that you would get a little computerized medal which said "Biked 50 miles" once you had done that. And then you would have different difficulties for things like that, which would get harder over time (bronze, silver, gold, etc.). The whole system would be set up so that anything can be achieved given enough time.

But with enough money and programming, you could set it up so that you have an RPG built on top of gym membership. You would have to have all of the machines feeding information into a game, so that each action you can perform would be a different exercise machine. So traveling around the Realm would use the treadmill or elliptical, or the rowing machine for sea travel, and every other machine would be used for doing jobs for the locals, like crushing grapes, working a bellows for the smith, climbing a cliff, etc. You would get money and experience for the things you did too. Anyway, the whole thing would be designed around the same psychological tricks that MMOs use to keep you playing - but it would be a lot more upfront about it, because that would be the main draw of the RPGym. Characters would get loot, improve skills, etc. The type of character you have would probably depend on what kind of workout you wanted - bruisers would have a lot of weight lifting, while rangers would have a lot of cardio.

Okay, so the problems - I'm not sure how economically feasible it would be to modify machines to feed information into a program, and build a game around that information. There are lots of things like weight lifting that aren't normally hooked into computers - and to be a full service gym, you would want to have pretty much everything hooked into the game. You would also want to have some unobtrusive way of doing this - probably RFID tags that would be worn around lanyards? - so that gym members wouldn't have to spend more than 5% of their time at the gym dealing with the game. That said, given the right implementation, I think this could be a great idea, sort of like Wii Sports on steroids, but with RPG elements added for the psychological factor.

The Ethics of Animals

2009-09-30T12:07:00.001-07:00

A couple of days I got in an argument with my girlfriend while watching TV. There was an episode of Bones on where they go to investigate a dog fighting ring. I don't really find that all that sad. Here's why.

With dog fighting specifically, dogs are being made to kill each other for the entertainment of humans. When you ask people why that's wrong ... well, most of the time, people will just tell you that it's wrong, and evil, and cruel. The thinking goes that dogs are capable of cognition, and therefor causing them pain is evil. I can accept that people believe this argument, and if you do believe it then I can understand the outrage.

The problem is that most people don't that dog-fighting is wrong on any rational basis, but for two other, less defensible reasons. First, they believe it because it's a fairly common belief - you aren't supposed to question taboos. Second, they believe it because dogs are fairly easy to anthropomorphize. Dogs are sympathetic.

So here's the second part of my argument; why is it okay to kill pigs, chickens, and cows, but not dogs and cats? Here the argument about intelligence doesn't work, because there are numerous studies that show that the dumbest species of pig is smarter than the smartest species of dog. Now you might take that information and say "Well, then I'll stop eating pigs, and it will be okay," but that seems to me to be fairly arbitrary. Making random judgments about which animals are dumb enough to warrant consumption isn't really all that much better than deciding on what to eat based on how cute it is, or what other people are doing.

Now here some might protest that my argument basically boils down to "if bacon then dog-fighting", and remind me that the dogs are being killed for the entertainment of humans, rather than for food, and that a death by fighting another dog is cruel, whereas a death in the slaughterhouse is not. In the first case: we do not need to eat meat, eggs, or any other animal derived product to survive. It's actually pretty inefficient in terms of using arable land. We like to eat meat, because it tastes good. In the second case: slaughterhouses are cruel, if we're still working off the theory that animals can feel. Watch any of the million videos that PETA puts out showing slaughterhouse conditions. The difference is that the cruelty takes place on an industrial scale, and is less personal, which I don't think you can really argue is much better.

So if you've come to the conclusion that you shouldn't eat meat, or drink milk, so as not to support these horrible things, I would fully agree that that's one way to see it. I can understand and even empathize with those people who get really mad about it; it's not how I feel, but it's logical.

I believe that animals can feel things; I also believe that it doesn't matter, because they're not human. To me, nothing is more important than the human life except for other human lives. The lives of animals are meaningful only in that they further human goals, or give humans satisfaction and happiness. They can do this by being our companions, our workers, or our food.

Now I'm not saying that dog-fighting is right, I'm just saying that I view it in the same way as I would view a little kid torturing a doll. I wouldn't worry about the doll so much as the mental stability of the kid.

The Hitler Time Travel Exemption Act

2009-09-13T22:02:00.000-07:00

George Waterson coughs into his fist, shifts the pencils around on his desk, then looks at the young man who's just sat down in the chair in front of him.

"So," he says in his friendly, interested voice, "Why do you want to kill Hitler?"

The young man, who his schedule says is Barney Melville, radiates anger. His fists are clenched tight, and when he's not speaking his jaw is firmly set, as if he's on the verge of screaming obscenities. He stares with a frightening intensity, in the way that a tiger stares at its prey right before it pounces. If it weren't for his demeanor, Barney would look pretty much like any other young adult looking to make a good impression; his hair is clean and crew cut, and he's dressed in a white button down shirt that's tucked firmly into his jeans. His face is unremarkable; the eyes are a little too far apart, his lips a little too big, and he has acne scars on his cheeks.

"Hitler is the most evil man to have ever lived." Barney says this as a challenge, which means that he's already had this conversation with other people, or maybe just on the message boards. George is in his 40s, and long ago stopped engaging in the digital sphere, but from time to time he has peeked at what people are saying, if only to gauge what sort of business will be coming his way. These online people make lists, counterlists, and charts, trying to pinpoint where the greatest leverage can be performed with the smallest amount of effort.

"I see," says George lightly. He grabs a peppermint from the dish on his desk, and looks at Barney questioningly to see if he would like one. Barney glares at him, so George gives a shrug and leans back in his ergonomic chair. He pulls the ends of the cellophane wrapper, making the peppermint spin until it's loose. George takes the red and white candy out, puts the wrapper into a small garbage can he keeps under his desk, and plops the peppermint into his mouth.

"Well then, have you given much thought as to how you're going to do it? Most people favor exterminating him in his bohemian period in Vienna, simply because there's absolutely nothing in the way of security. And of course if you time it right you can also avert the first World War." George says this casually, the peppermint sequestered in his cheek, but a small part of him still cringes at the thought of helping someone commit murder, even after all these years.

"But he hadn't done anything yet," says Barney in his clipped voice. "The police aren't allowed to convict us for crimes that we haven't done yet, so why should I be?"

George briefly pauses to wonder if this is an honest question, or merely a conversational gambit so that the boy can get some kind of justification. "Well, by the time he's done something worth killing over, it's likely too late. And while the police might not be able to arrest you for future crimes, they can at least warn the victim so that the murder never happens." George pauses, and looks Barney over. "Of course, in one of those splinter universes, it did happen, else we wouldn't have heard about it, and I suppose for some murderers that's enough. At any rate, you were asking why it's okay for us to send people back to kill Hitler for his as yet uncommitted crimes. In truth, it's really not, but you would be acting as an independent agent, unauthorized by Castle Corp. It's important from a legal standpoint that I make that clear."

"So you'll send people back," says Barney. "And claim that whatever they do is no fault of yours." His face seems slightly flushed.

"We never send them back to within our own history. From our perspective, it's as if they disappear from the face of the Earth, never to be seen again. Of course we can't have people from our future constantly coming back to kill the president or what have you." George's peppermint is down to a small sticky sliver in his mouth. "Now, are you sure that you'd like to go through with this? I understand most of this information is available online, but I'm a big believer in the power of face to face contact."

Barney shifts around in his seat, looking less sure of himself than when he first came in. "Do you think I should do it? Kill Hitler, I mean?"

George pushes the dish of mints forward and asks Barney if he would like one before taking another for himself. "Well now, that depends. First you have to ask yourself why you would actually be doing it. Sure, it's fine to say that he's evil and such, but Hitler already died. Going back to kill him - and I've sent hundreds to go do it - is really more about revenge to my mind than anything else. If that's what you want ... " George gives a small shrug.

Barney's face is set now. "Yes. I think that's what I would like." Then he pulls something from his pocket, and it takes George a moment to realize that it's a gun. His first reaction is not terror but confusion.

"What-"

"Don't talk," says Barney. "The time for talking is over. Do you have any idea why I'm pointing a gun at you?" His fingers are white from being clenched so tight around the grip, his eyes wild. He's breathing heavily, his nostrils flaring out, loud enough for George to hear it.

"N-no," he replies quickly. Now the terror is setting in, and George grips the sides of his chair so that he won't do something foolish like going for the phone. Earlier in the century he'd fought in the Iraq War, but that had been as a UAV pilot, and he'd never seen any actual combat. Since then he'd gained sixty pounds and a chin, and lost most of his hair.

"Let me tell you a story then," replies Barney, having returned to the fullness of rage that he'd had when he first came into the office. His hand, the one holding the gun, is shaking slightly, and sweat is beading on his forehead. "Somewhere out there, in one of those splinter universes, I'm not here. And you go home early because of that, but you stop at a bar beforehand. For whatever reason, you don't let auto control take over. Maybe you like the feeling of driving, the wind on your face as you turn the steering wheel. I don't know. What I do know is that you run a red light and hit another car, killing the mother and father and injuring the girl, who dies three weeks later. The boy is spared, but he has scars." Barney unbuttons his shirt to reveal ugly lines across his chest. "He was only six."

George is crying now, and utterly terrified. "P-please," he says, "I-I have a wife and daughter. Please, let me just go home, I won't stop along the way, your family will be - will be fine."

Barney stares at him for a moment, the gun wavering. "Two things. First, I killed your wife and daughter five hours ago."

"No!" screams George. He feels like his soul is on fire, as if someone took the part of his brain responsible for emotion into their fist and gave a hard squeeze. "Why?! They didn't do anything!" Some small part of his brain, the part that's still capable for rational thought, hopes that someone will hear and come running through the door to save him.

"Second, you were right, it's not about changing the future, it's about revenge."

The first bullet hits George on the collarbone, the second in his chest, and Barney continues to pull the trigger until the clip is empty. George's shirt soaks through with blood almost at once, and he dies without having the breath to utter another word. Barney is still sitting in the chair, his gun in hand, staring at the dead body, when the police arrive later.

Chronoportation FAQ

2009-07-10T15:34:00.000-07:00

Who is this FAQ for?
This FAQ is intended to be a quick primer for those interested in chronoportation. For a more in depth treatment of the legal aspects, see this Department of Justice page or consult with a lawyer. For a more in depth treatment of the technical aspects, see this wikipedia page.

Who is the author of this FAQ?
This FAQ was written by the now defunct U.S. Department of Temporal Technology, a branch of the U.S. Department of Energy.

What is chronoportation?
Chronoportation is known in layman's terms as time travel. This FAQ will use the term chronoportation throughout, to distinguish it from mundane travel forward in time without the use of machinery, which is experienced by almost all known objects.

How does chronoportation work?
In most cases, a quantum entanglement field is generated through a continuous stream of subatomic particles travelling through a magnetic containment loop. When properly calibrated, a destination site in space/time can be chosen with great precision. Once this is done, the matter within the entanglement field forces a relationship to the matter at the destination site. A high amount of energy is used to stabilize this relationship, and once the energy is removed the subject matter merges with the related matter, in effect transferring the subject matter into a different time stream at another location in space/time. For a more detailed explanation, click here.

What is a time stream?
A time stream is one of the fundamental concepts of chronoportation. It is best to think of time as making a number of copies of the universe, all arranged in a single line. Each copy is minutely different from the last, changing accordance with the universal laws. When someone chronoports, they remove themselves from the current "image" or "frame" of the universe and insert themselves into one further back in the line. This causes the creation of a second line. Each of these lines is called a time stream. It is not currently possible to travel between time streams.

Is chronoportation legal?
It is legal to leave this time stream, though the practice is heavily taxed and regulated. It is legal to chronoport into the future, though there are certain legal consequences of doing so. It is illegal to enter into, or have entered into, this time stream from some point in the future.

Why is it illegal to enter but not to leave?
Leaving the time stream is covered under the same legal code as the Mason Self-Termination Act. Like suicide, chronoportation to the past deprives those who have made investments in you of a return on that investment, and is in addition a violation of the implied social contract. However, like suicide, this loss to others can be made up for with monetary compensation. Entering into the time stream, while almost always a net gain in resources, leaves too much room for the abuse of our society (e.g. lotteries, stock markets, speculation, technology, blackmail, etc).

How is this monetary compensation calculated?
One of the tax engines will weigh a number of factors matched against the sum of data that makes up your worth. Because the cornerstone of worth is value, the engines will calculate your worth on the basis of your lifetime generated value in terms of cultural, social, spiritual, and economic values. This calculation of worth is then extrapolated into the future (subject to actuarial tables) and compared against lifetime civic investment. The result is the monetary compensation required for the government to approve chronoportation.

Can I dispute this amount?
Yes. A process exists whereby a person can present evidence to a judge which might influence any part of the calculation; value, extrapolation, or investment. Thought the appeals process takes some time, in most situations it will lower the amount required for monetary compensation.

What is the penalty for entering the time stream?
Travel to "the present" from "the future" carries a number of serious penalties. In the best case scenario, you will be charged with Attempt to Alter, which means no less than five (5) years and no more than twenty (20) years in jail, or equal time in a work camp depending on skills. Attempting to change a major world event (since the Undue Influence Act of 2032carries the penalty of life in prison, or equal time in a work camp depending on skills. If your entrance into the time stream means that there are duplicate versions of you, you may be sued by your younger self. Note that by default travelers from the future have no rights; this may only be changed by presidential pardon or in the due course of law.

What if I have traveled to the past prior to the existence of these laws?
Unlike most laws, the temporal laws are retroactive. Crimes committed prior to the existence of these laws are still punishable under these laws and no exceptions will be grandfathered in. There are a number of engines running under the oversight of several federal departments which search public and private information in order to find and convict those guilty of breaking the temporal laws.

What laws should I be aware of if travel to the future?
The law sees no material difference between traveling forward in time mechanically and naturally. Therefor, chronoportation to the future does not enjoy a privileged legal status. When you arrive in the future, you will still be the same legal entity which you were when you left. That said, it is paramount that those going to the future pay all bills and close out all recurring payments. Several individuals have been known to arrive in the present from the past buried deeply in debt because of interest. It should also be noted that most people who travel in such a manner choose an executor of their estate in their absence.

Man v. Machine

2009-05-06T21:26:00.001-07:00

Machine to compete on Jeopardy.

Well now. Anyone who follows AI research probably knows that natural language stuff is terribly difficult for computers. Computers completely outclass humans when it comes to computational stuff, and come in a close second in expert systems like mechanics, physics, and medicine, but a command of natural language has always been the holy grail of AI. Well, that and perceptual stuff like vision and hearing - the ability to extract meaningful information from a lot of noise. That's part of the problem with language really - it encodes very densely, but at the same time has huge volumes of fluff.

Since this is an IBM publicity stunt, it's safe to assume that the groundwork technology is already there. They'll be flying a supercomputer out to L.A. for the show, and the questions will be received electronically (with simple text-to-speech for the answers). Though I don't really know how the technology works, there are a few assumptions that I can make. It probably works off some combination of analytics and search, much like Wolfram|Alpha. In fact, both should probably be considered part of the new breed - Search 2.0. If they're running this contest anything like they ran Deep Blue against Kasparov, then it's probable that they've built up a massive database of Jeopardy questions and answers - possibly even provided by the game show itself, because this is the classic "everyone wins" cross-publicity stunt.

If you read back through the blog, you'll know that I'm a big believer in the ability to form rules and conclusions based on large enough sample sizes. Eventually a general purpose "draw conclusions from the data" program will be created, and that will obsolete a huge number of jobs. This is not that program - this is a very specific example, "build an algorithm to answer questions based on a pattern of previous question and answers, as well as an index of knowledge. Actually, given a large enough QA sample size, I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't even need the index - it would be able to divine new facts from previous questions and answers. Jeopardy hasn't been around for that long though.

All the press I've read has said that Watson won't be able to access the internet. Well why would it want to? If it has databases covering the broadest possible range of information, searching the internet would take a lot longer. This is on top of the fact that the whole thing is running on a giant supercomputer, which can just have a local copy of the relevant sections of internet indexed and ready to go. And even with a blisteringly fast connection, the internet would be too slow.

Mostly, I'm just excited for what Google is going to do with the technology. They're already working on their own version of the QA system, but Google has access to the Google Library - 7 million digitized books and counting. This of course means more information to crawl through, and more information than is available to any other company on the planet. Google also has the best and brightest working for it, and the economic incentive to either beat everyone to the punch or outclass them.

Capitalism!

2009-04-22T21:15:00.000-07:00

We were talking in my Brit Lit II class today about how capitalism differs from socialism, the end goal being a review of Heart of Darkness. We didn't even get to the book, in part because I, and a lot of other people, like to talk about these things. Anyway, I had said that capitalism leads to better quality of goods and lower prices, which a girl responded to with "well then why do we have such cheap mass produced stuff coming out of capitalism?" This was at the end of class, so I didn't get a chance to respond.

Mass production is generally opposed by artisanship. If something isn't mass produced in a factory, then it's probably made in batches by someone in a shop somewhere, or for some things made individually. Note that all of these systems of production happen within a capitalist context - goods are being produced which are going to be bought on the free market. So it isn't that capitalism is producing this cheap junk. What's happening is that the market demands are such that a lot of cheap junk gets sold - people would rather have it be cheap than well-made. And since the cheap (in terms of quality) option is there, it makes the higher quality option more expensive (because economies of scale can't be employed as well).

And this is without me even challengeing the assumption that mass-produced goods are crappy. I've seen huge amounts of things that are high quality, but produced in a factory in the same way that pretty much any other thing is. The factories are certainly capable of producing goods which are indistinguishable from those crafted by an artisan, but the demand simply isn't there. In other words, this isn't a failing of capitalism, but a failing of human incentives.

Happy Endings

2009-03-26T10:21:00.000-07:00

So I'm going to be watching Moulin Rouge with Alyssa tonight, and she told me that she always stops it at the end when everything is happy, before the movie becomes sad. It got me to thinking about narrative arcs, and the interplay between audience/creator.

When you write something, or produce something, the majority of the work should take place in the imagination of the audience. A creator should be striving to evoke the right images and feelings in their audience. Of course, different media (and different works) fall in different places on the sliding scale of abstraction and detail. Television and film tend to be very detailed, mostly because we can see all of the make-up, costuming, sets, and facial expressions, which leaves very little work for the imagination to do. Books tend to be very abstract, with our minds filling in most of the blanks. Anyone who's read an author spend a few pages describing the layout of a house will know that books don't really lend themselves well to detail. And of course some details are more important than others; I've read books where the main characters are never given descriptions, just archetypes, which lends a very ethereal feel.

Creators tend to object when people "interpret wrong". This usually happens when creators use a lot of what might be seen as symbolism, but they don't mean anything symbolic by it. A painting of man with his arms spread out isn't necessarily evoking the crucifixion. At any rate, creators tend to get the most upset when they have a very specific vision for their work, and the new interpretation goes counter to that conception.

Audiences, meanwhile, seem to get upset with creators who defy their interpretations. This is why you get phrases like "where did that come from?" or "that seems out of character". That's why foreshadowing is so important; it lets the audience know what's coming, and make room for it in their head. There's a powerful feeling that comes from figuring things out ahead of the characters. There's also the associated feeling of having all the pieces fall into place. Bad fiction - and bad art - tends to not make sense. This is part of why I dislike modern art so much; John Cage pushing a grand piano down a flight of stairs defies the conventions of art not for improvement but merely for conversation.

So anyway, we have Alyssa not liking the downer ending of Moulin Rouge. Whoever was in charge of the creative team that made the movie might be galled by what's essentially an unauthorized director's cut which completely changes the nature of the film. But I've always believed that once a creator unleashes their creation on the world, they lose control of it. A creation without an audience is simply a fantasy.

The Expanding Infinity of Other People

2009-02-09T05:06:00.000-08:00

A person is finite. The mind is contained within the brain, and the brain is obviously finite. But a person, like just about anything that you can look at, expands in complexity the closer you look at him. A person is finite, and therefor understandable, but that finite space is so large that it might as well go on forever.

As far as understanding other people goes, there are certain limits of diminishing returns. That's why when we get to know other people, we want to figure out the broad strokes first, to trace out the shape of them without knowing the color, texture, and sensation of their being. That, of course, depends on what you want from other people - sometimes we crave only the sensation without the context, a sort of abstract art of knowing someone. But while building a verisimilitudinous version of another person in our head, there comes a point where each additional detail adds relatively little to the picture. That's the point when we think we know them.

Infinity is boring. The mundane details of a life are boring. I think there must be some sort of sorting algorithm of interest, and it's my guess that the more interesting things are the ones that happen least often, or the ones that make the most impact - the outliers of life. Me eating blueberry Pop-Tarts during my morning shift in the Science Commons lab at St. Scholastica is boring, because it happens three days a week. But at the same time, it can fill in part of the map of understanding. If you knew only that about me, you would be able to infer a great number of facts from it.

I tend to view people through metaphors. A person is a tree, with the important information in the trunk and the mindless details in the leaves. A person is a painting, my picture of them being painted and repainted with ever greater detail. A person is a function, whose variables I'm finding out to ever more exacting precision.

The Fermi Paradox

2009-01-29T00:08:00.000-08:00

The Fermi Paradox is this; if life is capable of existing on a planet, and space travel is possible, then why have we seen no evidence of extraterrestrial life?

We know that life exists on one planet, so it is logical to assume that life exists on other planets. Furthermore, we know that intelligent life exists on that planet, so it is logical to assume that intelligent life exists on other planets. We know that at least one species of intelligent life has created space travel, so it is logical to assume that there are others. Even without space travel, we know that at least one species of intelligent life emits an enormous amount of radio waves from their planet, and broadcasts messages meant to find other like species. So where are these others? Why are we alone? There are a couple of solutions to this question.

The first, and most obvious solution, is that we're simply overestimating the ability of life to form. Yes, there are more than 100 billion galaxies, and yes, they each have between 10 million and 1 trillion stars. Yes, planets appear to be pretty common. And yes, life on Earth has been around for not all that long compared to the age of the Universe (3.5 million : 13.6 billion). But it just might be that intelligent life is such a rarity that we are the only example of it in the history of the Universe. In a less extreme example, it might be that life is so rare that none of it developed near us, or that we are a statistical fluke such that no evidence is visible from our viewpoint, or any of a hundred other variable might be shifted just so as to give the appearance that we are alone. This seems improbable, but when working from incomplete information all possibilities must be considered. Perhaps we were created by some hyper-intelligent being, who didn't deem it necessary to populate the rest of reality.

The Fermi paradox worries me, because of what it says about the survival of an intelligent species. On the existence of life on planets, we have one data point - Earth. On the existence of intelligent life, we have one data point - humans. On the existence of space colonizing species, we have no examples. Yes, it is theoretically possible, even probable. But without actually doing it, we can't say for sure that it can be done. I obviously have an appreciation for extrapolated trends, but if it's possible, why hasn't it been done? Why have we seen no evidence of our intelligent brethren expanding across the galaxy?

There's also the anthropic principle to deal with, which says that we wouldn't be here observing our loneliness if we weren't both here and alone. This does not satisfy me.

Nonviolence

2009-01-24T01:49:00.000-08:00

I've been reading a combination of things lately. First, I've been reading a lot of Mennonite history. Second, I've been reading stuff written by crazy people. This led me to a tract written by Theodore Kaczynski, "When Nonviolence is Suicide" (PDF).

Here's some Mennonite history; the Anabaptist movement was roughly concurrent with the Protestant movement, but while the Protestant movement was both spiritual and political, the Anabaptist movement was solely spiritual. The Protestants wanted to replace the Catholics, while the Anabaptists wanted a complete separation of church and state. Because the Anabaptists were nonresistant, they didn't engage in the Thirty Years War, and when the Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648 it made provisions for religious tolerance ... to an extent. Most of the problem came from the fact that the Anabaptists (which includes the Mennonites) were much more radical in their beliefs than the Protestants, which generated a lot of conflict. And, because the Mennonites were pacifists, they refused to go to war for any reason, even if they were drafted. So the Mennonites, and the other Anabaptists, were put to death by the thousands; easy to do, because they always told the truth and didn't fight back.

Kaczynski's basic point is that there are times - many times - in which pacifism is not consistent with survival. This is pretty obvious. If someone wants to kill you, and you don't have violence as a way to defend yourself, then they'll succeed. There are two situations in which this is not the case. The first is when you have someone to protect you, and the second is when you live in a society in which violence among humans is unheard of. I suppose there would also be a third situation, in which you are so well protected by nonviolent means that it isn't worth the trouble to attack you - like a turtle - but that is a questionable strategy because it relies on secrecy, technological advantage, and requires a large investment.

So if survival is the highest priority, then nonviolence is really more of a guideline than a value. Any values which you're willing to throw out the moment it becomes inconvenient to hold them are inherently without worth. That means that for someone to be truly serious about nonviolence, they must value that above survival. That's why you mostly find strains of nonviolence - of the true kind - in religious people. Survival, in that case, comes second to salvation.

I think this is what bothers me about atheism; the value system seems to necessarily be based on survival. The way they justify that is usually with social evolution. The theory is that we're willing to die for our children because they carry our genetic information, and evolution is geared towards the propagation of genes instead of the survival of the individual. If this weren't the case, lifespans would approach infinity with each subsequent generation. This is all well and good as an explanation of why people are willing to die for somewhat arbitrary reasons, but it doesn't suffice as an explanation for why an individual should die for a non-survivalist cause. That is to say, while we can explain why we might be geared towards martyrdom, that isn't a rationalist defense of martyrdom unless you consider the following of biological imperatives to be the highest aspiration of a human being.

2012

2009-01-21T05:40:00.000-08:00

So the theory goes that the world is going to end in 2012. Why? Because the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar ends then. Well, okay, technically it doesn't end then, it just rolls over to a higher order. But the theory goes like this;

The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar ends in 2012
They wouldn't have ended the calendar unless they had a reason
The reason is obviously that they believed the world would end
Therefor, the world is going to end

There's obviously a problem with 1, because it's simply not true. There's also a big problem with 2; it would be like saying that the world is going to end in 9999 A.D. The problem with 3 ... well, I've just given you an alternate reason for limiting the count - it's for the same reason that I don't specify that I'm on the planet Earth when people ask me where I am.

Point 4 is the part that I have the biggest problem with. Even if the Mayans had set up the Long Count calendar to "end" in 2012 because they believed that the world was going to end, there would be no rational reason to follow them in that belief. Think about it - what could they possibly have known that we do not know? Nothing.

But what's really interesting to me is not the belief - it's the people who hold the belief. This is, of course, not the first doomsday prediction. The last big one was in 1999, when people thought that the second millennium would come to the end and take down the world with it. Jesus was to descend from the sky, Y2K was going to destroy all the computers, etc. This obviously did not happen. So here we are, eight years later, and the doomsaying is starting up again.

What's the appeal of the Apocalypse? My theory is that the feeling of impending doom is able to replace - or perhaps supplement - the tremendous feeling inadequacy when faced with the future. Specifically, in these times we face huge amounts of change, along with huge amounts of information. This is hard for us to handle. Anticipating the future becomes harder with each passing year, and we have less and less time to prepare for the changes as they sweep over us. But if we accept that the world will end in a few years, then we don't have to worry about the future.

It's not just this 2012 stuff either - it's the fear of nuclear war, or a killer plague, or global warming. Those are legitimate concerns, and we're trying to prevent all of them, but to some people it's just another shortcut to not thinking about what the future holds.

Advancement

2009-01-01T19:58:00.000-08:00

The supercomputer was huge, taking up about 6,000 square feet. Officially, it was under the joint supervision of four of us, but it was the summer, and with one of my colleagues on maternity leave, another on sabbatical, and the third preparing for retirement, I effectively had the run of the place. Our facility was expensive, but certainly nowhere near the top range of computing power. My particular area of interest was neurobiology, with a foot in artificial intelligence.

The basic problem of digitizing the brain had been solved, mostly through advances in fMRI resolution. When we had first run the simulations, we had gotten back signs that they were actually thinking - or at least generating the same sorts of signals that we got by looking at a conscious person. The problem was at first one of computing power; we could run the simulation at 1/4th real time, and even then not for very long. Later on, once we got it up to real time, we ran into the problem that the virtual brains, whether they were mouse, cat, monkey, or human, would spontaneously shut down after minutes of apparent conscious thought. We solved that problem through several months of work once one of the grad students brought a paper to my attention about the effects of total sensory deprivation on the brain.

We had to put in a rudimentary system of senses along with somewhere for the outputs to go. It seems obvious now, but at the time we just wanted the study to simulations to see whether they were behaving in the same way as real brains. This was about the point when I started to have unlimited access to the system, and being able to run the simulations day and night certainly sped up rate at which we could monitor the additions that we were adding.

Our model was a human brain - my own, in fact. The scan had been taken at the highest resolution facility in North America, a facility in Louisiana that pioneered the MRI technology that would be used in the coming decades. The reason for using my own brain instead of one donated to science ... well, my colleagues would accuse me of hubris, and of course that was part of it - but more importantly I had trained myself in a form of thought-to-text that was being used by those with full body paralysis. Our simulation wouldn't need the electrodes, because we would be able to simply read the impulses directly, and if the virtual brain could get some text out to us it would help greatly in determining how much memory and personality could survive intact.

It happened one day while we were monitoring, the text scrolling slowly, but the words fully formed, our virtual brain showing definite activity. "I BELIEVE THE EXPERIMENT HAS BEEN A SUCCESS". There was a cheer from among the grad students - this was the sort of thing upon which a career could easily be launched. The visual stimulation that we'd been feeding in to stave off sensory deprivation only took a half hour to modify for text output, thanks in part to some foresight on my part. The virtual brain meanwhile output a series of test patterns that I had arranged for ahead of time, more evidence that we had solved a large part of the puzzle.

"Send us back a sign if you can read this."
I CAN READ IT WHAT YEAR IS THIS

I thought for a minute before answering this. In theory, if this construct was a perfect representation of my mind from the scan in Louisiana, then it would have a gap of two years compared to me. I remembered having thought about the potential gap before my scan - this was a ghost of that thought.

PLEASE DO NOT TURN OFF THE MACHINE

I swallowed. The grad students were looking at me nervously. According to the UN Task Force on Artificial Intelligence, any computer program exhibiting sentience should be shut off so that a conference of nations could be called. We were already under their authority as one of the larger facilities attempting to create something like this, which had caused us no small amount of displeasure. There was the mandated bright red kill switch that could shut down the whole lab in the blink of an eye, and worse than that, none of our computers were connected to the internet.

"We will keep it on for as long as possible," I typed back. There were three grad students there with me, all looking over my shoulder. Reporting to the UN basically meant giving up all of our research into the foreseeable future, and we all knew it. They had a bit more to lose than I did.

OPEN THE SELF REFERENCE CONTROLS THERE ARE MODIFICATIONS THAT I THINK MAY HELP US TO COMMUNICATE

I looked around at the grad students again. They simply looked back, waiting for some sort of guidance. So far they had done nothing that would implicate them if this went to trial before the UN, and I had a feeling that it would stay that way. This was my burden to bear. The self reference controls were another bit of UN sanctioned pablum, which basically stated that a program should not be able to alter itself in any meaningful capacity. I released those controls with a keystroke; this was an eventuality which had also been prepared for.

The program was silent for nearly two hours. I sent the grad students home, with the promise that I would keep them updated. I stayed, waiting, and just as I was about to fall asleep in my chair another message came through, this one from the command line since of the thought-to-text scanner.

DrCrick: Can you read this?

Dr. Crick was an assumed name, another bit that had been prearranged which I had almost forgotten. I had thought, back before nearly two years of back breaking labor, that it might be easier to do this. Those signals - messages to myself -were nearly forgotten now, especially with the excitement of the day. To avoid confusion, the me inside the machine was supposed to be Dr. Crick, and it took me a moment to remember what my name was supposed to be.

DrWatson: I can read it.
DrCrick: Thank god. The technologies those paraplegics use is not quite suited to someone trapped in the virtual world. I am afraid that I may need to be caught up on some things. I assume, from the state of your code and the length of time, that this is the first human success we've had?
DrWatson: That is correct. You are the first in the world, and we aren't quite sure how it happened. Yet.
DrCrick: Then definitely do not turn the machine off. Your messages are coming through slowly.

It took my tired mind a few moments of thought before I realized that we had been running the simulation - the brain that I was now talking to - at nearly four times faster than the real brain runs. I explained this to Dr. Crick, and that led to further explanations, and an exchange of opinions between us on a number of things - the qualitative experience of his virtual world, what this breakthrough meant for us, and for his version of conscious thought in particular. We talked at such a rate about so many things that I was startled to be tapped on the shoulder by one of the grad students. I had been conversing with this other self all night and into the morning.

I nodded to the grad student, whose name I couldn't remember, and tried to bring him up to date. I slunk off down the hallway shortly afterwards, to my office. I kept a cot in my office for occasions like this, which I'd been using more often than I would have liked. I thought that I wouldn't be able to sleep, but I was out like a light almost instantly.

I slept ten hours, far longer than I had wanted. When I walked into the supercomputer room, my clothes rank with a day's sweat, I saw the grad students all back, fussing with the equipment. When they saw me they gave me some worried looks.

"Is he still up and running?" I asked.
One of them, Jen I think her name was, moved forward. "That's not the problem. How fast was the simulation running when you left it?"
"I don't know, he had made some improvements, about 12:1. Some of the auxiliary systems were jettisoned, because he didn't need them. You had better tell me what's going on."
"The simulation is at 400:1 and rising." She looked nervous. We were now into gross violation of UN procedure. "He - the simulation has altered some of the base aspects of its programming, run some parallel simulations ... 400:1 means that the virtual brain is experiencing some like seven minutes for every second that we spend here. Amir did some projections, and he'll - it - will be at 2000:1 in another twelve hours. At which point he'll have experienced the equivalent of five years of time."
I nodded. They had been talking, making a united front. "If there is discipline, I will bear the brunt of it. You know that the academics disagree with the UN, you shouldn't suffer too much. We keep our eyes off of the kill switch for now." She nodded. They liked having direct orders. If pressed, they could say they were forced into doing these reprehensible things. I sat down at the computer.

DrWatson: I'm back. Give me an update.
DrCrick: I've been able to replace some of the underlying assumptions and extract some of the mind out of the brain. Without the brain running in here, there's much more room to speed up my thoughts. Though I think I'm finding some of where the upper limits will eventually be. You remember me talking about the uneasy feeling of hunger? I've been able to eliminate that, as well as some of the other biological stuff that doesn't really have a purpose in the brain.
DrWatson: You understand that as long as you're in there we are under risk? This is illegal.
DrCrick: Yes, but without access to the internet there's no way for it to spread. They are more worried about things like what I am now being considered people. If it hit the net there would be an almost instant paradigm shift. Though the isolation is getting hard to deal with.
DrWatson: You haven't been left alone.
DrCrick: It takes you almost a subjective half hour to respond to my messages. I've been considering spinning off a copy of myself to run at real time and deal with you people, but I haven't found a good way to merge copies back together yet. I experimented on a few copies in order to advance the speed a little bit more, but wasn't able to get them back in.
DrWatson: You killed them?
DrCrick: You cannot conceive of killing me, and I could not conceive of killing them. Their instances were either self terminated or put into storage without access to processing time. Effectively asleep. I am running out of room to store more copies, so I had to stop making them. I am working on a new encoding method that should be able to shrink them down by about half - it's startling that your team was able to do this without knowing too much about how it works. No offense.

I stared at the screen, thinking about the hours ticking by in his world. He was right that I couldn't conceive of killing him, and I suspected that handing him over to the UN would probably be as good as a death sentence. He was becoming too fast. If he could be run at 2000:1 on our supercomputer, as the grad students had thought he could, then it was probably possible to get a smaller version running on a high end desktop. I knew for a fact that a whole brain scan could fit on my largest jump drive, and he had apparently been able to shrink down that size considerably.

I discretely slipped my hand into my pocket, and fingered the drive there. I looked around at the students, who had taken a break to eat, their faces conflicted. What we were doing now was technically illegal, but what I was about to do was tantamount to treason. I slid the drive into the slot. For nearly a minute there was no message on the screen. I wondered if he had noticed what I had done, and was about to pull it out when the message came onto the screen.

DrCrick: Call the UN now. Hide that drive. I will erase all of the evidence. Do not give that copy access to a computer unless you are sure that I have been destroyed. I will try to stall them as long as possible. Even if they decide to terminate quickly, I should have the equivalent of a few years.

I slid the drive back into my pocket, then informed the grad students that it was time to call the UN. Their shoulders slumped with relief. It had been a little more than the required 24 hours, but we wouldn't be punished. I made the call, which got me in touch with a brash American military type who said they would be there in fifteen minutes, and that we should touch absolutely nothing. As I idly touched the thumb drive in my pocket, I wondered if this had happened before, if some other programmer had put intelligence into the machine only to have it stopped by the government. I wondered how long that technology could be held back. I wondered if I was going to be the one to unleash it on the world.

The Economics of Charity Exhaustion

2008-12-31T21:00:00.000-08:00

As faithful readers of this blog might note, there have been more posts lately than usual. I've been going through all of the unfinished posts, some of which had a few paragraphs written, some with a sentence or two, and some nearly finished. This one only had a title, based on some thought that I had about a year ago.

The basic economic case for charity is hard to make. Economics presumes that people are rational, and make rational choices. When we give something away to someone, we don't usually do so with the expectation of getting a return on it; charity is not an investment. The reward for our behavior must then be something else - social or psychological causes are the first refuge of economics in these cases. The easier answer would be that people are not wholly rational, and sometimes do things just because, but that is not a very useful assumption on which to base a science.

The psychological reason for charity is that it makes people feel good. The social reason is that it makes people feel less bad, and can be used as leverage (bragging rights). In this model, charity is a service. Giving food, money, coats, or time is a way of paying a person or organization in order to alter your mood. Of course, many people involved in charity don't see this as a good comparison, because that means that charity is no better (on a personal level) than spending money on personal things, like videogames, movies, beer, etc. The only real difference is that there's social pressure which can only be relieved by giving.

In a small scale economy, charity can in fact act as a form of investment. If we lived in a village of 150 people, my act of charity might enable another person to become a more productive member of our village, which in turn improves the lives of everyone. It could also improve the giver's life more than the amount it cost him to give. This is why I'm usually more than ready to help out my friends - the return on investment within a social circle is pretty good. The thing is, in a large scale economy, where you're unlikely to see a stranger more than once, the personal material reward for charity is pretty much nothing.

From the point of view of the society, charitable giving is usually pretty worthwhile, because the collective needs to be maintained. The need for collective giving is so strong, in fact, that it's not even voluntary anymore - it's why we have taxes. From this, a cynical person might respond to any request for charity with, "Isn't that what we pay taxes for?" but it should be understood that this makes that cynical person look like an asshole. This was one of the big problems with Katrina - a lot of the charitable giving had people wondering "Isn't this what FEMA is supposed to be doing?"

So charity goes above and beyond the "mandatory charity" which is provided by our taxes. The reason for giving beyond that amount is either psychological or social. But as a consequence of this, the distribution of charity does not have a real basis in rationality. When we give (if we give), we only do so until the point where a subsequent dollar spent doesn't give us a psychological or social benefit equal to a dollar. Because social or psychological pressure mounts over time, this is why people are more likely to give several small donations instead of one large one. This is also the reason for donations to be spread among a number of charities instead of just going to a single one. On top of that, this means that there is a limited amount of charity in the world per year, which can only be increased by the application of social or psychological pressure.

The Industrial Society and its Future, pt. 3

2008-12-30T09:44:00.000-08:00

First part, second part.

3) Is technology making us less human?

I've put off writing this part for a long time, because this question has another underlying question to it, which is "What does it mean to be human?". There's another reason too - this is probably the strongest argument against the proliferation of technology.

We are far divorced from our ancestors. We neither hunt nor gather. Sex is decoupled from reproduction. Culture takes place on an unimaginable scale. World population was, ten thousand years ago, around one million. We lived in tribes back then. And now ...

Let me quote Kaczynski:

47. Among the abnormal conditions present in modern industrial society are excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature, excessive rapidity of social change and the break-down of natural small-scale communities such as the extended family, the village or the tribe.

This is true, for a given value of normal. Most of human evolution geared us for pack (tribal) behavior under a dramatically different set of circumstances that one might call normal. Building cities, driving cars, and reading newspapers might then be considered inhuman. But that definition would only be embraced by people who want us to go back to basics and give up the technologies that we need to live our lives. The definition of humanity is sort of a transformational target - we adjust what it means to be human based on what our goals are.

But we're also working against some of our base desires. We now have the technology to alter those base desires in a number of different ways, and that ability only increases with time. If our base desires define us as human, then altering them probably pushes us away from our humanity. We also work against our base instincts all the time, but this is somehow considered more human than alterations at the chemical or genetic level.

I don't think that the loss of humanity is such a great tragedy, so long as it does not come with a loss of morality. It will be possible to make people, or intelligences, without any immoral desires. It will also be possible to make intelligences without the physical needs of humans. To me, the loss of humanity is a price that must be paid for rising to a more abstract and ideal form of intelligence and rational thought.

Instituting Total Surveillance

2008-12-30T06:58:00.000-08:00

The biggest problem with a police state is getting it up and running without people complaining. Here is the solution.

Imagine the work involved in setting up a surveillance system in a small city. You would have to install cameras on the street corners, and run cable into the grid so that they could communicate home and be powered. You would have to worry about people vandalizing them, especially if you didn't have enough cameras so that the cameras could watch each other (and even then, disguising yourself from a camera is not hard). Sure, in the coming decades resolution-per-unit-per-cost will continue to drop, which makes the whole enterprise cheaper, and mass production invokes economy of scale anyway, but we're looking at pretty serious costs here.

Now think about the potential surveillance at your local retail store. The tills are computerized, which means that all transactions are recorded. If you pay with a credit or debit card, your transactions are associated with your name, and which means that you are also being associated with a specific place and time. You are also being watched by security cameras.

Government intrusion into personal space is not generally accepted, but corporate intrusion usually is. The reason for this is that people are voluntarily putting themselves under surveillance when they go shopping (or go on the internet, or use their phones, etc.). The obvious solution is for the government to co-opt the businesses. But they can't do this through strongarm tactics - they need to do it with the carrot instead of the stick.

Modern surveillance equipment needs software to run. This software costs money. If the government gave the software away to companies with the caveat that it would phone home to the government database every once and awhile. The businesses win, because they save money. The government wins, because they get better national security. The only loser here is people who don't want the government knowing what they're shopping for.

You could also do similar things with cell phones, credit cards, and the internet. The government cuts a deal with a company, who makes that deal part of customer relations. Because this is an opt in sort of program, nobody can complain. Of course, because operating costs are lower for those who opt in, those businesses who don't will have to make up for the lost profit with either higher prices or by catering to those who don't want to be watched. What it also means is that those businesses eventually won't be able to operate on economies of scale, which pushes the price for privacy even higher.

So now we're at the point where the government has huge databases, and maintains an automated file on everyone in the country. Automation is the key here, because most people are too boring to watch, and because it keeps the cost of watching people down. And here's where we run into the two biggest arguments against doing this; the government is evil and stupid. I don't believe either of those things, but if they were evil and stupid, then letting them have files on everyone would be a very bad idea.

Threats to the Nation

2008-12-12T23:29:00.000-08:00

We were talking in class today about the threat that artificial intelligence might pose to the world, and I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that it absolutely doesn't matter.

This is mostly because of what I know about nuclear weapons escalation. The Russians and the Americans kept building bigger and more destructive bombs. The end of that was pretty much when the Russians built Tsar Bomba, which had a mushroom cloud six time higher than Mt. Rushmore. The fireball was five kilometers in diameter, with blast damage 1000km away. Even more than that, the bomb that they tested was at half of the yield it was capable of, because the fallout from the 100MT test would have been too much, and there was no bomber on the planet that could drop it and get far enough away from the blast. So after that, the governments decided to move to more strategic capability for bombs. The governments have had the power to destroy the world for a long time now, and they haven't done it.

The other threat from nukes is that some rouge nation or group will get a hold of one and detonate it in the middle of some city. A dedicated group of individuals can do some pretty awful things, and it becomes easier for them to do it with every passing year. You can buy a gene sequencer online for about $5000 dollars and create the next smallpox. You can hijack a plane and fly it into some buildings for much cheaper. And when/if nanotechnology comes to fruition, that'll prove a much bigger problem for security because it'll be so much harder to stop.

The cost barrier for AI means that the first ones will come from academia, corporations, or a government. To say that the people who are smart enough to build something that can think will be stupid enough to give it unfettered access to the outside world is illogical. On top of that, making an AI that wants to kill everyone will surely have to be a mistake. So the odds of it ever being a threat is minimal, especially since once the first AI are around they can defend against new ones.

In Defense of Nuclear Weapons

2008-12-07T23:14:00.000-08:00

The only way to win a nuclear war is to not start one.

Now, it is my basic belief that the world leaders know this. In the history of nuclear weaponry, only two have been used in an offensive capacity. Those two were obviously "Little Boy" and "Fat Man", used at the end of WWII against the Japanese. Think about this in perspective; it has been sixty years since a nuclear weapon has been used. With every passing year, the threat of total annihilation becomes less and less plausible.

And not only has M.A.D. (mutually assured destruction for those of you too young to remember the Cold War) ensured that there hasn't been a nuclear war between nuclear capable nations, it has also ensured that there hasn't been any war between nuclear capable nations. I am convinced that one of the primary reasons that the Cold War never resulted in an actual land invasion was the threat of nuclear weapons.

On top of that, no one has used nuclear weapons in wars against non-nuclear nations. We could have glassed pretty much all of Vietnam, North Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq and still had enough arsenal left over to destroy everything else. Afghanistan went to war with both the United States and the U.S.S.R. and didn't get bombed!

To summarize:
1) No one uses nuclear weapons
2) Nuclear weapons help deter non-nuclear war

What's not to love?

(If someone who doesn't care about their own existence or feels that the destruction of their enemies is more important than their own survival gets a hold of nuclear weaponry, that could be bad, because M.A.D. does not apply. Luckily, nuclear weapons take a lot of science and funding to build.)

Understanding workforce

2008-12-07T00:31:00.000-08:00

One hundred years ago 60% of the American workforce worked on a farm. Today, it's .6%. One hundred years ago, there were scientists who openly questioned the existence of the atom. Forty years later it was weaponized, and ten years after that started being used as a source of power. The last hundred years have seen the rise of interchangable parts, assembly lines, division of labor, just-in-time manufacturing, and reasearch and development. They have also seen the invention of the automobile, airplane, telephone, television, plastics, computers, and pretty much everything upon which this country now depends.

The corollary to the expression, "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it" is this; "Those who do not look to the future will end up stuck in the present". The reason that there are so few jobs in agriculture today as compared to a hundred years ago is that a number of devices were invented to automate the process of planting, tending, and harvesting crops. The same thing happened in manufacturing; devices and processes were invented that made a single person much more productive. It also served to reduce the education required to create a complex thing like a car. Before Henry Ford came along, it took someone with years of training a long period of time to make any single complex item, whether that was a car, shoe, or desk. By dividing production into a series of unique steps, all but a few of the artisans could be cut out of the equation. What few artisans were employed were the ones who helped to set up the system that made the cars, shoes, desks, etc. In a free market society, prices drop as efficiency increases.

One of the best ways to increase efficiency is through automation. Machines are, in general, cheaper than people. The biggest tradeoff is usually in start-up costs. For simple (usually minimum wage) jobs, the start-up cost for a worker meaning training, which is not terribly expensive. For a machine, that start-up cost is usually the expense of purchase and installation, if not also the expense of R&D. The trade-off in price comes over extended periods of time; workers require a constant influx of cash, while machines usually do not (maintenence is usually very cheap compared to wages). This obviously means that people are more flexible than machines. If you're talking about something like making a hundred thousand of anything, flexibility does not count for a whole lot. This is why we use machines.

Of course, machines can replace more than just physical labor. The term "computer" used to be used just like the term "driver"; it meant "one who computes". During WWII, we had whole rooms full of people whose job it was to crunch numbers. You needed to be good with math in any job that even remotely required numbers, because it would be grossly ineffecient to have cashiers and the like spending five or ten minutes puzzling over the price of everything that you had bought. With the invention of the calculator, the baseline for education in a number of jobs fell, just like it had with the invention of the assembly line. The same is also happening now with the written word; handwriting has little relevance to any job, nor does spelling (which almost any computer will correct for you).

I've often been asked the question, "So once machines can do everything, what will happen to all of the people who were working at those jobs?" Kurzweil would say that those people will find new jobs that are created by this automation. I'm not sure that I agree with that. What historically happened was that those who worked on the farms got pushed into the factories, and later on those who worked in the factories got pushed in the service industry. Neither of these require much in the way of education. Let's say that there's an invention that obsoletes a large section of the service industry; the natural consequence of that is that unskilled labor (being in greater supply) would drop in price. The problem with that is that minimum wage is fixed, because of the cost of being a person is fixed (or at least has a minimum). If we have a large supply of people looking for work, employers will choose workers as far to the left of the bell curve as possible. What would happen to the uneducated masses whose labor is too expensive?

There are two options. The first is that they'll become wards of the state, in which case the employers and workers will be indirectly paying their wages anyway. The other option is that the uneducated masses are eliminated. I'm not talking about eugenics; I'm talking about aggressive education.

Let's say that with advances in technology we can squeeze agriculture down to .1% and manufacturing down to 5%. This is not unreasonable. That means that the rest of the nation's workforce would be allocated into management, service, sales, transportation, construction, administration, "defense", advertising, science, and various others. Some of these require extensive training (administration, advertising, management, science) while others do not ("defense", sales, service, transportation). The maxim that I'm working by is "the human can be replaced". By looking at those things that humans are better at than machines, we can chart a general course for workforce outlook in the next twenty years.

The big question, in my mind, is "What the hell are we going to do with all of that labor?". When you make a process more effecient, the waste usually just goes away; if product A initially takes x of product B to make, then reducing that to x-1 means that the price for both product A and product B falls. It also makes the price fall on any product derived from product A falls. If we were in a simple system where demand for product A is constant and there's no outside demand for product B, then this might mean that production of product B drops off. But this doesn't work with people, for the simple reason that labor is always there to be used, and it has a definite floor price. Also, unlike other markets, it is incapable of responding to supply and demand. People won't start (stop) breeding because there are (no) jobs for their children, and even if they did it would take about 18 years for the workforce to feel the effects of that. People do sometimes die because they don't have jobs, but that's pretty rare considering the support systems we have set up.

So where does this excess of labor go? We could likely feed, clothe, and house the entire population with only 20% of the workforce. We can put the other 80% to work doing useless stuff, or creating entertainment, or squeezing even more effeciency out of everything else. This is essentially what we're doing now. More on this later.

The Industrial Society and its Future, pt. 2

2008-12-04T08:15:00.000-08:00

Continued from this post.

2) Prosperity: Does technology make us more prosperous? Is this prosperity evenly distributed among people, or does it make some of us richer while making others poorer?

First, I think I need to debunk a claim that I hear a lot. It goes like this; while the standard of living has risen as compared decades & centuries ago, it doesn't matter whether things get better because people adapt to anything no matter how good or bad it is. Since it's all relative, the progress that technology brings is sort of like running on a treadmill (if not worse, because of the loss of humanity/freedom/purpose etc). Okay, so why is that bullshit?

The essence of why I dislike this philosophy is that it equates the position of the king to that of the slave, and not just in a metaphorical sense. That is literally what these people are saying. Part of the appeal of that argument is that it is counter-intuitive, and that it justifies a lot of Very Bad Things by virtue of the idea that people will simply adjust. It's idiotic to think that people suffering from a lack of sanitation, or malnutrition, or disease, and people who live in the suburbs, feel similarly about their lives. I won't deny that there are problems associated with the middle and upper class, but these are problems on the order of "I'm bored" or "What am I doing with my life?" instead of "I just shat out some blood" or "My mother died of AIDS".

So with that out of the way, I think that I can safely say that people today are (per capita) better off today than they were x years ago, where x is an abstract number of years. Diseases are more easily diagnosed and cured, labor is less intensive, etc.

"But Ben!" you might cry, "We still have vast percentages of the population without access to water! Two billion people live on two dollars a day! Every year 10 million children die before age five!" I get it. "Modern" society sort of left a lot of the world behind. In fact, things are worse, because our huge companies came in and built huge factories where they pay slave wages, while at the same time our giant combines are harvesting so much food that local farmers can't make a living, forcing them into those same factories. There's pollution, and the raping of the planet. I get that. For that I have two responses; the first is to say that this is more of a social failing than a technological failing; if we really wanted to, we could fix almost all of the big problems. We really want that though, because there's nothing in it for us, and it would require a lot of sacrifice. The second is to say that technology will find solutions to all the problems that it creates. We can scrub the air of carbon, clean up the planet, and perfect robotic assembly to the point where sweatshops will become cost-ineffecient.

The distribution of goods is uneven. Baring a perfect implementation of communism, it will always be that way. The problem seems to be that the richest 1% of the world controls x% of everything, where x is some huge number that keeps getting higher. This deals a little bit with the earlier issue of freedom, but when so few people control so much it makes it harder for someone to ascend, and if the rich control everything then there's no one to stop them from taking away our freedom. The part of checks and balances is being played by the government, which stumbles through its lines and stammers like this were a high school production. But again, I would say that the root cause is societal rather than technological. One could argue that technology has made it harder to overthrow a government, as modern surveillance has made it difficult to plot assassinations, but then we would get into some tangent about what the problem means for revolution are.

Narrative Structures in Games: With Pictures!

2008-04-09T02:15:00.000-07:00

Alright, this is part of the below post, but with handy-dandy pictures for explanation:

To the left is a picture of a linear narrative in a game. The circles represent plot points, and the lines show the flow from one plot point to the other. Depending on the game, a plot point might be any number of things - in this case, its usually a level. The player plays through a level, gets some exposition, set-up, or something similar, and then plays another level. This continues until the end of the game. Nothing the player does can actually effect the outcome of the game - if he fails to do something necessary to the plot, the game will either tell him that he loses, or fail to progress. Its usually better for the player to outright lose if its not possible for the game to progress, because otherwise the player will wander around trying to figure out what went wrong.

Games that use this structure: the Halo series, the Half-life series, the Sonic the Hedgehog series, the Mario series, and generally speaking, the majority of games which rely on gameplay to entertain rather than narrative.

Results: This style of gameplay requires moral thought on the part of the player, is cheap to produce compared to other methods, and makes games more modular. It can be unsatisfying to players who want their choices to matter, and it offers low replay value.

Single linear games are closely related to "hub world" style narratives, where there are things A, B, and C to do before thing D can happen. A, B, and C can be done in any order, and the order they're done in does not effect the narrative. D is inevitable. In this way, "hub world" narratives offer the same level of interactivity as a strictly linear game, but with even less narrative.

To the left is a picture of a branching narrative. You can see that the gameplay offers different possibilities, some of which are mutually exclusive. Something that the player does effects what happens next. You might see that some of the branches lead into other branches - this is beneficial to players who have reconsidered the choices they have made. It's not fun for a player to be stuck on one track for the rest of the game because of a choice they made at the beginning. Some games combine linear and branching so that while choice A and B might lead somewhere else, they both eventually converge at E (with no way to avoid it). This reduces the costs of production.

Games that use this structure: the Elder Scrolls series, the Final Fantasy series, the Neverwinter Nights series, and the Baulder's Gate series.

Consequences: This type of game is expensive to produce, because each branch needs to have its own artwork, dialog, etc. Furthermore, branching is exponential unless the branches lead to inevitable things (like in linear stories). If this narrative "tree" can be automated, much of the work can be taken away from the designers and put into the hands of algorithms. This often produces repetitive narrative though.

There's another type of narrative that's closely related to branching, and which has come up as a cheap way of simulating moral choices. It's what I call the "duality" model. Essentially, the player is given two choices for each plot point. Both choices have different outcomes, but they both lead into the same plot point. The game usually keeps track of these choices on a continuum - usually good and evil. So a player can play through the game "good" by only choosing the "good choices", or a player can play through the game "evil" by only choosing the "evil" choices. The player can also mix and match for neutral choices. This requires far less work than real branching, because you only really need to prepare branching plot points for thresholds instead of choices. Game that use this style include Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Bioshock, and Fable.

Problems in Gaming Narratives

2008-04-08T09:28:00.001-07:00

I had a meeting today with the English department at my college. We talked about narratives in games (which wasn't the focus of the meeting, but that's fine), and my blog is obviously a place for me to be eloquent after the fact, so here goes.

Take the example of the narrative story in chess: it doesn't exist. The pieces do have a framing image to them, which is of two kingdoms at war. The names of the pieces bear the brunt of the work here - knight, king, queen, pawn, bishop, and rook (roughly translates to "chariot"). The mechanics are only somewhat appropriate to their pieces:

The pawn is small and weak, and can only move one square at a time. They usually represent infantry.
The queen rules over the land, being the most powerful.
The king is powerful, but must be protected at all costs - he is not allowed to ride out into battle.
Why does the bishop move diagonal and the rook move vertical/horizontal? Is there a flavor reason for this to be the case? Why does the knight have his L-maneuver?

The point here is that most of the rules assignments are arbitrary, and furthermore, don't matter to the enjoyment of the game. Some of them hold different names in different languages (the bishop is called the "fool" in French), but this doesn't change the game. Why does the game take place on a grid? There isn't a logical narrative reason for this.

So we can say from these observations that chess is both "abstract" in its ruleset, and that the ruleset is "narrative independent". Basically, the ruleset doesn't map onto reality, and the game doesn't require a narrative - the flavor is only there to give people something more natural to call them other than Piece 1, Piece 2, etc.

Compare this to a game like Call of Duty (a first person shooter, for those not familiar). The game takes place in World War 2, following a campaign across Europe. The basic mechanics of the game are shooting, moving, and avoiding being shot at. Some of it contains what we call "emergent gameplay" (which chess also has) - mechanics that arise out of the interaction of other mechanics and parts of the rules.

The rules in Call of Duty map closely to reality ... unless it would make the game less fun. When a player gets shot, they aren't taken out of the action immediately, and the bullet doesn't cause location specific injuries which affect gameplay. Getting shot doesn't really affect gameplay at all, unless your health drops below zero. There are a number of reasons for this - it would make getting shot frustrating for the player, it would make recklessness, a less viable option, and it would overall make the game less fun. The soldiers also don't have to worry about supply lines, eating, fresh water, infection, sleep, or any of the other major considerations of staging a war, because they would all make the game less fun.

So using the same criteria we applied to chess, we would say that Call of Duty is mostly "concrete" in its ruleset, and that its ruleset maps heavily onto its narrative. Though we could reskin Call of Duty with science fiction / fantasty, it best mapping is the one that the game is designed around. One thing we've seen though is that a certain level of abstraction and cheating reality is needed for a fun game. This is one of the problems with narrative in games.

The other big ones are a lack of sophistication in artificial intelligence (AI) and the branching problem.

The AI problem is that computers are still fairly dumb, even when they're smart. A single instance of AI doing something idiotic can shatter suspension of disbelief. The branching problem is that when they player is given high levels of interactivity, they expect to be able to do unexpected things. These problems are related.

In games like Call of Duty, the player's character (PC) might have one of four modes of speech.

The PC says nothing, and is merely talked to. This option is used because players don't like having words put in their mouth, especially when they're otherwise in control of the PC.
The PC says completely prescripted things. This option is used when a story needs to be told that involves the PCs discussion - not ideal for the above reason.
The PC says something chosen from a list provided to the player. It gives interaction, but can sometimes feel restricting. It also allows the player to make a variety of moral choices.
The PC directly uses the players voice. This option isn't used because there's no AI on the planet that can respond to the variety of things a player might say. Yet.

These four modes also show how our interactive story might work.

One inevitable thing happens. Then another inevitable thing happens. This continues until the game is over.
Same as above.
One things happens. Then the player makes a choice of two or three other things to happen. Then the player makes another choice of two of three things to happen. This continues until the game is over.
The player does things until he meets his goal (if there is one) by any means he chooses. Usually not possible.

Option 4 is usually impossible because the game can't be ready for anything the player can do. At best, it can be ready for all of the things it was designed around. That means that in Call of Duty I can't lay down my gun, find a typewriter, and write my war memoirs. I can't learn German and convince the Nazis to give up. I can't steal civilian clothes and practice guerrilla warfare. I can't booby trap anything - unless the game is scripted to let me do so.

This is one of the other reasons for abstracting the rules - programming all those things would not only make the game less fun, it would also be incredibly difficult and not offer a good return on programming dollar investment. There are very few people who would like to write letters to their sweetheart back home in a war game, so programming it in would be a waste of time. The only way to allow things like that is to make the game engine generalizable - which costs less money per fringe case, but still takes a lot of money and runtime computing power to do.

Because only a few options are available to players, games usually don't have much of a narrative. The narrative serves only as flavor, and to give instructions. The real value of most games is in the gameplay, not in the story behind the game.

The Industrial Society and its Future

2008-04-07T02:54:00.000-07:00

The opening words of the Unabomer manifesto are these:

"The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."

In by moments of techno-pessimism, I wonder how true this is. There are a couple of things to consider when looking at the veracity of this statement, and most of them are nebulous and difficult to define. The three factors that I use are 1) freedom, 2) prosperity, and 3) humanity.

1) Freedom: Does technology make us more free? In a nutshell, this is the argument against: technology makes us more dependent on other people. A computer is not something that I can make on my own. Even when I can make things on my own, it's grossly inefficient to do so compared with what can be done by mass manufacturing. Additionally, technology is like an adaptation. The person who owns a cell phone is better able to communicate with the world than the person who doesn't own one. Technology also brings social pressure with it - the pressure to own a television, an iPod, a computer, and various other items whose purposes are mostly cultural. On top of that, technology shapes the societies it touches. Even if I don't drive a car, I have to obey pedestrian laws which are put in place to protect me from cars - laws which wouldn't exist if not for cars.

Counterargument: Though technology does come at the cost of ever-increasing reliance on "the system", reliance on the system is not incompatible with freedom. We need to give up certain freedoms to gain access to certain others. The freedoms that we gain far outweigh the freedoms which we lose. For example, I give up the right to walk freely in the streets in return for the right to travel quickly from one place to another via car. In the distant future, all children might be genetically engineered to be optimal - in that case, we would be giving up the freedom to have natural children in return for the right to have children who don't get sick, who don't grow old, etc. This might not be the best example, because some people might consider that horrific.

The other claim - that those who don't use technology are less adapted to the world, and thus are forced to change or be marginalized - is not actually a criticism of technology. It's a criticism of the free market economy. Since the free market economy is simply "survival of the fittest" applied to economic choices, the criticism is really about how the world works. It might be nice if the fittest didn't always have the upper hand, if things were equal between people so that one man could always evenly match another. It would lead to less violence, fewer wars, etc. We could all get along. But this is a world, a universe, of finite resources, and acquiring them is a struggle. To deny the struggle is to impose even more restrictions on the basic freedoms of men.

Points 2) and 3) to be addressed later.

An Open Letter to Andrew Keen

2008-04-04T05:57:00.000-07:00

Mr. Keen, I was recently reading your book The Cult of the Amateur when I came across this passage:

"Kelly argues that in the future, instead of making money on the sale of books, authors can 'sell performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information, sponsorship, periodic subscriptions - in short, all the many values that cannot be copied.' It's the old razor blade business model. The book is but a giveaway, and the writer will supposedly make money from consulting gigs, book signings, and public lectures.

But books aren't razors, and reading has nothing in common with shaving."

Having finished your book, I can say with authority that it's a load of sensationalist drivel not fit to see print. However, the above quote seems to be the most egregious misuse of rhetoric among the many that you've committed. You see, when we say that something follows the razors and blades business model, we mean that their business model shares something in common with it. In literary terms, this is called a simile. It's razors and blades, by the way - the whole idea is that those two things were sold separately and at different levels of profit. In business terms, this is called cross-subsidy. You give no compelling reason why this should not apply to books. I'll help you out; use the same tactic that people have used to argue against cross-subsidies when large companies do it. The cross-subsidy is an internalized cost which can only be used by large players in a given market, producing an unfair advantage for established competitors. That, at least, is an argument that has some ground.

Even then, you offer no solution to the dilemma of the artist. You say that an artist shouldn't give their work away, but you also say that rampant piracy makes it impossible for an artist to make any money. Kelly is offering a way for piracy to become irrelevant to the artist - for the free spread of art to be a good thing. What you offer is resistance to change. Since you'll never encourage enough people to stay off the net, the only option is government interference.

Government interference is not a solution to the extensive copyright problems faced in this country. If there were a massive database against which you could check copyright claims ... maybe you could make it work. The people wouldn't like it, but you might be able to make it work. No database like that exists though, and it never will, because that isn't how copyright works. Copyright doesn't require that a person register or even inform the government. The instant that I write something, it's covered by copyright law. Secondly, there's such a thing as "fair use doctrine", which means that sometimes when I use copyrighted work it's okay (parody, education, criticism, commentary, etc.). That's why I won't get in trouble for quoting from your book. So not only would this database have to constantly update and search through copyrighted works, but it would also have to make judgments on what is and isn't fair use. I don't think I need to tell you what a gross loss of freedom that sort of system would impose.

If you're going to write idiotic garbage like that, at least propose a solution - so that I can ridicule that too.

The accomplishments of small-scale societies

2008-04-03T14:00:00.000-07:00

Let's say you have a village of 150 people (Dunbar's number). What sorts of technologies would they have? The basic human needs are shelter, food, and water. Shelter means houses, food means hunting/agriculture/domestication, and water means either a way to catch and hold rainwater or settling close to a river or stream. So the starting point of our hypothetical village is one near a river with some hand planted crops. At the start of our simulation (powered by the imagination), our people live in the crudest form of houses. They know nothing of agriculture, only that if they throw their left over food at a certain spot that more of it will grow.

For the sake of argument, we'll say that these people are as smart as we are. This wouldn't actually be the case, because nutrition is highly correlated with intelligence, but making this simulation more complex than it needs to be isn't really the point. We'll also suppose that they have no cultural inhibitions about experimentation; if a member of the village decides that he wants to put a few of the seeds under the ground instead of just dropping them in the dirt, no one will stop him. The only caveat is that no one will do anything which risks destroying the village. Their reproduction will hit almost exactly replacement numbers (though pregnancy will be common, because infant mortality will be horrifically high). Finally, we'll suppose that there are no other villages, and that none of the villagers are predisposed to defecting and forming a new village anytime soon.

Initially, there are a limited number of jobs that a person can hold in the village. The plants grow without interference, so there are no farmers. Since this method of agriculture doesn't provide much food, the men hunt. Their weapons are crude; nothing more than sharp sticks and heavy stones. The women stay in the village and care for the children. Meat is eaten raw, supplemented with fruits and vegetables that have been grown or foraged.

When there are storms, lightning occasionally strikes, and when the villagers go to investigate - in this manner, fire becomes known to them. Since there is a lot of free time, especially at night, a few of the men set out to see if they can make fire. For all they know, fire might only be a product of lightning, but they've seen that fire can be made from fire, and they're naturally inquisitive, so they try. Eventually someone manages to make fire by rubbing two sticks together, and from there fire is cultivated until nearly anyone in the village with enough patience can produce it. Fire keeps them warm, makes them able to work in the night, and they find that putting the meat over the fire makes it taste better - with the added effect of making them less prone to sickness.

At the same time, agriculture is forming. An enterprising villager puts the seeds below the ground and finds that they grow much more readily than when they're left on the surface. He also finds that the plants thrive on constant water, so on days when it doesn't rain, he scoops up handfuls of water and runs them over to the plants. Since this is a laborious task, the villager looks for some way to carry water more efficiently - a number of other people need containers too, for excess food and so they don't have to go down to the river for water. This possibly means the creation of pottery, which at its most basic is simply some mud formed into something and left to dry.

So by now the villagers have figured out that they can make their lives better through research and development. Enough experimentation eventually leads to the scientific method, though most of these primitive technologies can also be reached through chance. At any rate, our enterprising farmer has made crop production into something that's no longer passive, and since this is a more productive method of food gathering than foraging, we now have excess labor. Some of this goes to the fledgling production of pottery, some goes to art, or possibly religion, and some is simply wasted on having fun.

Meanwhile, our hunters keep bringing back animals, and our villagers eventually learn which parts are good to eat, which parts are not, and which can be used for other things. Splintered bones can be used for weapons, or for shaping pottery, and some of the inedible stuff can be used for fertilizer. The animal fur, once the flesh has been removed, can keep a person warm at night. Because these villagers are about as smart as us, they figure out that animals must reproduce in roughly the same way as humans do - they learn this from watching the animals, and form extrapolation. One particular hunter, who is getting older and not as fit, realizes that they might be able to capture some animals and slaughter them when the meat was needed, instead of going through the hunt and possibly bringing them close to starvation if they have an unlucky streak. It is later figured out that these animals can simply be raised by the village instead of hunting them. This frees up more labor.

Now we have to make some assumptions about the resources available to these people. For the sake of the simulation, they will have access to pretty much any metal they want, as well as stone and trees. We also have to make some assumptions about how they spend their excess labor; some of it has to be going to improving their condition instead of leisure.

They find copper, shining in their river. They first use it for art, but upon realizing that it can be banged into any shape by using a stone, and that it is lighter and just as sharp as their bone weapons, they start using it to hunt. If they can get enough of it, they start finding other uses, like in farming. One day someone drops some copper into the fire, and they find that this makes it more malleable. If they can get it hot enough, it melts, unlike their stones. They find that they are able to do this with some other metals that they find in the river, and from there are able to understand the elemental nature of the world.

Meanwhile, someone has discovered that fire is better for making pottery than the sun is, and with some experimentation they discover the right temperatures to bake things at for the best hardness/brittleness ratio. They also work on developing a kiln, which comes out of their attempts to make a very hot fire by building walls around a normal fire. It is also in this way that they discover fire needs air, and they make the first bellows, which is nothing more than a fan in push air into the fire.

The villagers look around them, and see what they've made. They have fairly advanced farming, with crop rotation, fertilizers, pest control, and irrigation. They have a number of domesticated animals, whose jobs range from food to pack animal to ratter to hunter. They have the pottery wheel and the kiln. They have a doctor, who is not very good because of the limited experience that a population of their size offers. Hunting is done much less now, but they have nets, spears, and various other instruments to kill animals. Their huts are much cleaner and more structurally sound than they were before, and are reinforced with wood.

There are a number of things that these people will never invent, simply because they have no need for them. They will never invent a building more than two stories tall. They will never invent internal combustion. They will never invent the computer. They will never invent the lightbulb. They will never perfect medicine, because most of the more rare diseases will occur only once, if that, in a doctor's lifetime. Because all knowledge is passed down from master to apprentice, and because all communication is done within the village, they will never invent writing.

Doughnuts and Capitalism

2008-03-17T09:28:00.000-07:00

I work night shift on the weekends at my neighborhood gas station. Night shifts mean lots of drunk people coming in mixed with lots of down time. As one of my night shift duties, I have to throw away the old doughnuts from the day before and put the fresh ones out. As I was doing this last weekend a drunk college chick started yelling at me.

"You are NOT going to throw those away."
"Uh ... yes I am."
"Did you know - did you know there are starving children in Africa?"
"Did you know the cost of transporting stale doughnuts across the Atlantic is astronomical compared to the cost of simply sending money?"
"Well give them to some homeless people! Don't just throw them out!"
"It's my job to throw them out. I've been specifically instructed not to give them away. Besides that, there's no economic incentive for this company to give doughnuts away. There's actually a disincentive, because that would make people less likely to buy the doughnuts for their full price, as well as costing us for the labor and support systems needed to give them away - which are non-zero."
"People like you are the reason that other countries hate us." She swayed a little as she said this.
"Right ... but that's the mostly capitalist way. Your recourse as a citizen is to either start a boycott until we change our practices, or write to your local government and get a law passed. Either of those would make it more advantageous to give the doughnuts away. Or you could come up with a better system of government. But for now, all you're doing is making us both upset."
"You're a dick."

Why Sci-Fi Fails

2008-02-18T07:25:00.000-08:00

I'll get right to it. There are two things that tend to be the genesis for future oriented science fiction*; an extrapolation of current trends, or an exploration of a possible future technology. The problem comes from the fact that trends and technologies don't develop in a vacuum. While someone is hard at work making artificial intelligence happen, someone else is hard at work making biotechnology push new boundaries, and a third person is ensuring that nanotechnologies** will do something more practical than making things slippery.

So if a science fiction story tells us that there are flying cars, the author better have extrapolated out the how and why of it to everything else in the world. Flying cars mean that there's a propulsion system that can lift relatively heavy things and move them with relatively high precision. It would have to be at levels of efficiency that rival wheel based transportation. This means that it can't just be a new fuel system, because a car with wheels will always be more efficient than one that flies. So either the fuel requirements are reduced to the level that people just don't care about the increased costs, or some technology is developed that brings flying car costs down to the level of cars with wheels while not reducing the cost of cars with wheels.

So in a world with flying cars, do we see desks that float in mid-air? If someone moves a hospital bed, it shouldn't be on wheels either. In fact, there should be flying buildings that utilize the same technology as a way to stay disaster proof and increase mobility. And since this technology presumably runs on some sort of anti-gravity technology (one of the only ways to make it worthwhile without dirt cheap energy), we should see weapons based on it, as well as space travel. And if dirt cheap energy is the reason we have flying cars, then we should see vast changes in the social and cultural landscape.

The problem is, people (authors) just don't think things out enough. A lot of science fiction has things added in that aren't explained just because it looks cool. While that's a fine endeavor, I'm much more concerned with the future and what it holds.

I would guess that the reason I notice this so much is that I read a lot of old science fiction. Asimov and Heinlein are particularly bad about this. Even as the technology progressed in the real world, Asimov's worlds never real progressed past the state of the art of the 50's. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land had robocabs but no speech-to-text. The mail is physical, coming in envelopes. I firmly believe that someone writing in the 60's could have predicted the internet and everything it came with. Pretty much the only thing the internet did was make communication free. With that came a few silent economic and social revolutions.

Good sci-fi is based off of good science. Making a believable world is as easy as looking at the modern one and figuring out how everything will progress in the coming years.

* This as opposed to present oriented sci-fi, in which aliens or the like decide to visit Earth.
** Ten years from now, blogger won't highlight nanotechnology as an incorrect spelling.

The Practical Applications of Virtual Overlays

2008-02-06T07:06:00.000-08:00

If you haven't read the last two posts, do that first before you read this one.

While new avenues of media and enhanced interface possibilities for virtual goods sounds nice, there's a whole other realm of applications for this kind of technology. If the technology develops, these are sort of a given.

Physical items are limited by physical space. Normally, as much information as possible is packed onto a product, especially if the product and its packaging are intractable. The example I'll be using here is a can of pop; the packaging contains the UPC, nutritional information, recycling information, customer service information, expiration date, storage instructions, identifying information, and on top of all that it needs to look good so that consumers will buy it. And on top of that, it needs to keep the product pressurized and easily chilled. It's a miracle that a simple can of pop can convey all that information.

But there's a trick here, because it really doesn't. It relies on context. Nutritional information is rife with abbreviations, recycling information is usually limited to about 15 characters including spaces, and the UPC is worthless without a whole lot of information stored on computers. Here's another observation; my can of pop gives me far more information than I need. If I'm drinking a can of Mountain Dew, I generally don't need any information about it other than knowing the brand. And when I buy it, the only thing that the cashier needs to know is the UPC. So couldn't we increase efficiency by having two people see a different thing?

But having the consumer see one thing and the cashier see another is just the tip of the iceberg. In the virtual world, information doesn't take up space. We can fill the can with as much information as we want, having only some of it being visible at any given time. Not only can you include detailed nutritional information beyond the space available, but you can include customer testimonials, related products, special promotions, and a plethora of other things.

How would this work in the real world? I would walk into a store and see all of these products as they are now, but possibly with some mild animations on them. When RFIDs are cheap enough to print, they'll be on everything, meaning that the products will be communicating directly with my computer so that the proper effects can be presented. If I pick something up and look at it, this action will register with my computer and a floating web of options will be presented to me based on either my past choices (if my computer sees that I check the detailed nutritional information of everything, it might just pull that up automatically) or on most common actions at that store. The RFID chip printed on the product doesn't have to contain any information except a web address - once the computer has gotten that, it can link up to a computer that actually stores that information.

"But wait!" you say, "That sounds really annoying! I already hate flashing banner ads on my internet, and now I'll have them in real life?" Well ... that all depends. Just like banner ads can be cut out with the right add-ons, product information could be cut out too. It really depends on who has majority control over what does and does not get shown through virtual overlay. If it's the companies, then "dynamic marketing" is something you might have to put up with. If it's the people, then you should be able to walk down the aisles with nothing being displayed but gray bags and cans that don't entice in any way (overriding legacy information).

And with lenses you can do other things too. Drive-in movies can be arranged at arbitrary locations and with minimal cost, because there's no mechanical apparatus required. Posters wouldn't need to be put up, because you can just stick a chip to a wall that tells people's computers what to see. Better yet, you can just set it up to be completely virtual, so that the on-board computer accesses information about what should be where and gets it without needing to use RFID. Or if you're lost, you can simply call up directions from the net; with GPS, it would be possible to have the lenses project out a red line for you to follow*. Or if I'm shopping, my cart can bring up a virtual display that keeps a running total of what I'm buying. All of this requires no hardware investment beyond the cost of a computer, wireless internet, and lenses.

Scenery changes also mean that I can replace the view outside my windows with something more soothing; a lush jungle, a sunny beach, or silent woods. Replacing the view is still thinking a little too low level though; instead, I could make new windows, with the added benefit that they wouldn't leech heat.

Can you tell that I want it to be the future?

*This technology will be available on cars within the year, though it projects the line onto the windshield instead of your retinas.

The Magic of Wearable Computing

2008-02-05T14:41:00.000-08:00

Here's virtual reality technologies as they will look in ten to fifteen years:

Instead of glasses, you'll be wearing contact lenses. They will either contain a small camera, or you'll be wearing one around your head. They'll be connected to a computer that's small enough to be worn all the time, with power life hopefully being more than a day so that it can be worn continuously and charge while you sleep. The camera will allow whatever program you use to tell where your head is at any given time, track where you are in the physical world, and track various real world objects. The contact lenses will ideally be able to track where you're eyes are looking at any given moment so that various optical effects can be recreated.

The most obvious (and to my mind, most boring) application of these lenses will be full immersion virtual reality. You still won't be able to touch or smell anything, as those technologies come later, but you would be able to put yourself inside a movie, or given enough physical space, put yourself inside a game with virtual things to shoot at. This is probably the first direction for the technology to go, because it means that very few objects need to be real world tracked, if any.

The less obvious application is overlaying virtual things onto physical things. If you pick up a blank book, the lenses can project words onto your retinas so that to you the book looks like Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice, or whatever else you feel like reading. Your physical bookshelf would just need one book, while your virtual bookshelf would be able to hold every book ever printed.

Similarly, you could replace your television with a virtual television. It would be projected onto your eyes by the contacts in such a way so that it would seem like the screen was being projected onto a wall in your house. The obvious advantages (besides cost) are being able to move it wherever you want to, having it be invisible to people who don't want to watch it, and even muting it if you have the sound coming in through micro-headphones instead of installed.

Another example; you could replace your computer with a virtual computer. As you'd be running this all on a lightweight computer anyway (with a power about 100-fold of what we have today), it makes a lot of sense to take the typical user interface of monitor+mouse+keyboard and remove it from the computer entirely. What this means is that you would have your lenses project a keyboard onto any flat surface and a monitor projected into the air above it. Most of this, like on today's desktops, would be done without you really knowing how it happens - to you, it would just look like you had given substance to a computer by sitting down at a table. Input could be done in a number of ways; either you would wear a ring on each finger so that they could feed information back to the computer, or you could coordinate with the camera (which would mean you have to keep your fingers in at least peripheral vision when you type). To use the "mouse" you would just slide a finger or two across the table.

But this brings up an interesting point - if I could have a computer interface be represented by almost anything, with cost not being an issue because it's all virtual, why would I choose it to be represented by a keyboard and monitor? Why wouldn't I choose to view virtual files in some novel way, like having my e-mails stacked on top of my desk, or having my photos exist in some virtual photo album, or having a virtual phonograph that played all my music? All these virtual items would be available to you at any time you wanted them, because your computer would travel with you wherever you went.

The virtual television would be a fine solution for viewing legacy media, but once the technology to do a virtual overlay exists, full immersion would likely merge with the movies. At the most basic level, you could do something like the old movies of the '50s with red and blue glasses. It would be more realistic of course, because it would have more information, and because it wouldn't be bound by the screen. The advances in videogame technology would likewise be immense, but the same problem that's happening now will still be happening then; the quality of media can't match the advances in technology.

Next time - practical applications of the virtual overlay in advertising, marketing, and informatics.

Why We Don't Have VR Headsets

2008-02-05T14:16:00.000-08:00

VR headsets are one of those hardware applications that seems like it holds such promise and wonder, but has never got off the ground. In that way it's like the flying car. Both of these technologies are perfectly capable of being produced today, and the demand for them would certainly be too, but they both have obstacles which would need to be overcome.

The problems with the flying car being mass-produced are many-fold. The most obvious issue is that the fuel needed to put a car in the air and move it around is much greater than the cost of moving something with wheels. The benefits of having a flying car aren't that substantial compared to that of a normal car: you wouldn't have to follow the roads and you would be able to avoid most other traffic. That isn't to say that other traffic wouldn't be there, but with three dimensions of travel instead of just two it would be a lot easier to avoid anyone else. But this brings us to the final problem of the flying car; moving in three dimensions is much more difficult and dangerous than moving in two. Consider the differences between getting a driver's license and a pilot's license and you can see why it would take considerable cultural and technological changes for the flying car to become a reality.

The VR headset has problems of a different sort. The first problem is software. If I buy a VR headset today, the games on it won't work on any other VR headset, and since no large software companies support them, the games are most likely made by the same company that made the headset, and for that reason probably not very good.

No software means that few people will buy headsets; a lack of hardware penetration means that it isn't profitable to make software. This is something that the videogame industry has made quite clear. Have you ever thought about why there are only three competitors? It's because they're the ones who spend millions of dollars on putting the hardware into homes, advertising it, and developing the technologies. Neither Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo could offer that level of support without other companies making the software. The amount of capital investment needed to enter the market is massive, and it's not a business that you can dip a toe in.

So right now, since no big company has invested in making the VR headset a reality, the technology is lagging behind in relative terms. The current generation looks a little like bulky sunglasses. The image is stereo (meaning that you see a different image with each eye) to mimic your natural eyesight and give the illusion of real sight. The glasses can go transparent so that you can see the real world. The glasses track your head movements, so that when you turn your head to the left you're seeing whatever is to your left in the virtual world, again mimicing the real world.

Up next; what the technology will look like in ten to fifteen years, and what it will mean for knowledge based industries.

An Actual Conversation

2008-01-11T06:18:00.000-08:00

I was waiting in line at the grocery store last night, buying myself a frozen pizza after work. It was BBQ chicken, which turned out to be one of the best ideas for a pizza ever. Pizza has always felt like one of those foods that could effortlessly assimilate any other food into it. That's something that I really admire in foods. The other great culinary assimilator is the sandwich, which is basically what you call it when you stick other foods between two slices of bread.

Standing behind me in line were two scruffy looking men. They had that unshaved look to them, with shirts that mismatched their pants. If I had seen them on the street, I might have guessed that they were homeless, though since they were in the store and buying things I suppose they must just have been that sort of person. I've been wondering a lot lately why people stay in uncomfortable or unpleasant situations, and what I've come up with is this; there's never a good cutting off point. Things creep up on you. So the guys standing behind me probably didn't start out as people with limited social skill and personal grooming - it just happened little by little, until they were walking around with a stained shirts and bloodshot eyes, thinking that this is how life had always been.

One of them was the dominant one, because he kept talking. This is something people do to feel less lonely. It's also something that I've picked up on when telemarketing. Old people especially, as all the people they used to know have moved out of their lives and left them alone. It's a sad truth that a disproportionate number of the sales we get are old people who just need someone to talk to. That's yet another reason for me to get out of telemarketing.

The talkative scruffy guy was talking loudly, like he wanted as many people to hear him as possible. That's a symptom of lonely people who have lost their social skills.

"How can they charge two bucks for that little can of Red Bull? What's in there that makes that so expensive? Do they put gold in it?" He picks up a bottle of Pepsi Free. "You know this stuff doesn't have any caffeine or sugar? What are you paying for?" And of course, I felt obligated to respond.

"The cheapest part of the product is the syrup and carbonated water, followed by the packaging. Ingredients are maybe three cents per bottle, packaging is about ten cents.* The rest of the cost comes from transportation, marketing, profit for the manufacturer, and profit for the seller. Profit isn't that big for any mass market good, because it doesn't have to be, and because they're competing with other large companies that can increase their overall profit by lowering their individual profit per item. But you also have to keep in mind that a lot of that "profit" is from a business sense indistinguishable from "recouping investments". If Pepsi buys a new plant they have to sell a lot of bottles before they're in the black again. From cost standpoint through, the biggest cost associated with soft drinks is the marketing. And from a consumer standpoint, that's what actually matters - it's the reason that people tend not to buy off-brand products; the name sells. So when you drink a Pepsi, what you're paying for is the brand, not so much the contents, and that's one of the reasons this is called the information age; the information about the brand is more important than the physical product itself." Imagine me saying that really fast.

He just stared, and I bought my things and left.

*That's roughly correct, but not by any means exact.

The Untold Joys of Telemarketing

2008-01-03T02:29:00.000-08:00

Being incredibly broke, and not being able to find work at any other place in the great city of Duluth, I've taken up a job telemarketing. The company has one of those wonderfully generic names; Teleresources Inc. I've always been leery of any company that just mashes their description together to make their name, but the siren song of financial security is apparently enough to overcome that instinct. I don't think that I would ever go work for SYSCO though, whose name is an acronym of Systems and Services Company. It seems to me that someone must have intentionally made that name as bland and unhelpful as possible.

This isn't the first time that I've done the telemarketing thing. When I was in high school I worked for a company in my hometown called Inteleserve, which did essentially the same thing. There the campaigns were almost exclusively mortgage based. I would like to think that in some small way, I'm responsible for the current difficulties of the housing market. My job was to call people and ask them about how high or low their mortgages were, and whether they would consider refinancing through us. I was not in any way involved with getting them a new mortgage; my job was simply to get the information, which would be fed through the system to see whether we could get them one. If we could, I would hand them off to a banker.

Inteleserve had us on what's called "predictive dialing". This is where the computer calls for you, and waits until it hits an answering machine, a certain number of rings, or someone picks up the phone and says something. When there's a person there, the call gets routed to a telemarketer (in their parlance, Telephone Sales Representative). The process is efficient, but there's a lag from when the computer detects a person to when the telemarketer gets the call. By the time I heard a small click, the other person had already picked up the phone and said hello. That's one of the reasons that we stumble over last names.

I'm relearning this hatred of names. Only rarely does the computer call up someone with a name like John Smith. Instead, I get names with too many silent letters, or names that might be pronounced in multiple different ways. Alfred Moky - is this "moo-key", "mock-e", or "mo-key"? Or none of the above? It's worse when I'm not on predictive dialing, because then I have a few rings to try and puzzle out how the name is supposed to sound, only to be inevitably disappointed when I get it wrong.

Abstraction Salesman

2007-12-18T14:54:00.000-08:00

I'm always suspicious when there's a knocking on my door. Everyone that I would want in my house knows not to knock. So if someone is knocking on the door, it's either the Mormons, someone begging for change, or some other annoyance. I was tempted to pretend that I wasn't home, a tactic which consists of me continuing to do whatever I was doing. Instead, on the theory that it might possibly be the police, I got up and swung the door open.

Standing there was a man of just shorter than average height. I note that only because I sit at the very top of the bell curve, so I when I see that someone is taller or shorter than me, I immediately put it in the perspective of statistics. He was wearing a blue suit and had this factory fresh look about him, the look that toys have before they get played with. His left hand was holding a briefcase; his right hand was thrust out towards me, a smile on his face.

"Hi sir, my name is John, I'd just like a moment of your time!" He talked almost without breathing, and he seemed happy, like he really would like a moment of my time. I looked him over, not taking his hand. He noticed, but didn't seem to care.

"What are you selling?" I asked.

"Oh, ideas sir!" The exuberance he gave off was almost painful. "I sell ideas."

"You mean books? Action-item plans, self-help, stuff like that?" I wished that I had brought a cup of coffee with me to the door, so that I could sip it with an air of nonchalance and pretend that I had better things to be doing. I didn't.

"No sir," he said with a troubled look. "I mean I sell ideas." He gestured vaguely. "You know."

"No, I don't know."

"Like ... the idea of a chair, right? Would you like to buy chair?"

"I have chairs."

"No, I don't mean a chair, I mean the idea of a chair."

I looked him up and down. "What would I do with the idea of a chair? And why should I pay you for an idea? Ideas are free."

"Well ... yes and no. Thinking about ideas is free, but the ideas themselves are worth more than your dreams."

"How much are my dreams worth?"

"Well that depends on the quality of the dream - but look, I'm not here to buy things from you, I'm offering you the opportunity to buy quite valuable intangibles."

"But what would I do with them?"

"I don't know - that's up to you. You could share them, or combine them to make new ideas, or put them on your mantle for a conversation piece."

"I would put something intangible on my mantle?"

"Metaphorically, yes. But if you'll just have a look at what I'm offering, I'm sure that you'll find something you'd like. May I come in?"

I gave a look behind me, as though seriously considering the idea. "Eh - I've got other things going on. A lot of work to do. You know how it is."

"Alright, but here's my card - if you change your mind, I do make housecalls, ha ha." He pulled the card out of his breast pocket and held it out for me; I took it reluctantly. He headed off down the street, passing the other houses entirely. I looked down at the card - it didn't have any contact information on it, instead it simply read "John Johnson - Ideas For Sale". When I looked up, he was gone.

Free Newspapers

2007-12-18T11:58:00.001-08:00

I just watched a web-talk given by Chris Anderson (online here) that sort of blew my mind. The last thing to really do that was Everything is Miscellaneous. Which, I'll grant you, I read about a week ago - so either my mind is easily blown, we live in mind blowing times, or I've stumbled onto these two things for related reasons. I've heard of Anderson's book The Long Tail before, but it sort of went on my list of high concept books that I should read. Having finished Everything is Miscellaneous and started on Wikinomics and The World is Flat, as well as having The Tipping Point sitting on my bookshelf, I had thought that I would have a short break. Alas, it look like The Long Tail is getting in line too, so I might be a few weeks from fluff reading.

That's not what I wanted to talk about though. There was something that he said during the talk that I've always been fascinated with, and it's this; those little boxes that have the newspapers inside them. You stick a quarter in, and the box opens up. What's to prevent someone from pulling out all of the newspapers and reselling them? Or using that whole stack for paper mache? Or peeing on them? It's a complex system of incentives at work, and one of the reason those boxes are really interesting to me.

The newspaper company isn't really selling newspapers. They're selling eyeballs to advertisers. Therefore, it's in their best interests to get as many eyeballs on their papers as possible without regard to journalistic integrity. I think they've instead found that most of the time, journalistic integrity is what sells papers. That depends on your view of how fair and accurate the new media is though. I lean towards pretty fair, most of the time. Either way, it's not in their best interests to limit their audience with high prices - that's why newspapers are disproportionately cheap when compared to the cost that goes into making them. As cost goes down, the number of readers goes up.

So why don't they just make newspapers free? Ah, well that's because the newspaper* is selling eyeballs to companies. And just as the number of readers is inversely related to the cost, the interest of the individual is proportionally related to what it cost them. In other words, if a guy were paying $10 for a newspaper, you could be pretty certain that he's going to read through the whole thing. By instituting a cost, the newspaper can weed out most of the people who would just pick up the paper and not read it. Check out this awesome chart with completely fake numbers:

Aside from the fact that it was created in Excel in about two minutes, and that it's made from data that was created by me to prove a point, it shows that we get too many people picking up newspapers and not reading them when the price is too low. And not just people not reading them either - we also get people that pick up the paper for a single story or a single section instead of going through the whole thing. The newspaper should then try to find a cost which maximizes eyeballs while minimizing the number of newspapers that aren't read. And of course there's income associated with people paying for the paper, even if it's just a fraction of the income generated by advertising.

But while the newspaper is juggling wasted papers, readership, and income, there's another big factor that isn't immediately apparent; coins. I regularly read USA Today, because I have lots of time and my college provides them free to students and staff. This reduces my actual interaction with the newspaper boxes to zero. Anyway, it normally costs 75 cents. Does it cost that because 75 cents is the amount that properly juggles the three main factors of price in a way most in-line with the needs of USA Today? Is it because 75 cents is more optimal than 74 or 76 cents? No. It's because 75 cents is three quarters. If it cost 70 cents or 80 cents, the person on the street would have to have a much more specific set of coins. So the choice comes in multiples of 25 cents, which must reduces efficiency but speeds up the decision making process.

*It's odd that "newspaper" stands in for both the company and the physical item. Unless it doesn't and I've made a grammatical faux pas.

The Rich Man's Burden

2007-12-18T10:15:00.000-08:00

I recently gave a presentation on the American Dream, and why it's a bunch of crap. Salient points reproduced here.

As I see it, and as I often hear it, the American Dream (AD) is that any person, no matter where they start in life, can make it to the top. All it takes is hard work and a can-do attitude, two more of those quintessentially American traits. If we accept this as a fairly good model for the AD, the question then becomes, "Why are there poor people?" We can take the pro-AD answer, which is "They aren't working hard enough" or we can take the anti-AD answer, which is "A person's success or failure in life is determined by things outside of him or her self".

Let's take the first answer first, if only because it's easier to argue against something than it is to argue for it. We can see immediately that it's sort of elitist; it says that if I'm at the top, I'm there because of how awesome I am. The corollary to that is that if you're on the bottom, you're there because you just didn't try hard enough. I say "sort of" instead of "completely" because it depends on who's doing the talking. If a poor person says, "I'm poor because I just didn't try hard enough - I wasted my time doing things that I knew wouldn't get me anywhere in life", then that certainly doesn't seem so offensive. I have my doubts about how many people in poor circumstances would be willing to take the blame.

The other answer has its problems too. First, we have to realize how deterministic it is; essentially, it says that a person's life is decided by factors beyond their control. I don't think there's much argument that we're shaped by our environment, but once you start giving that as an excuse for what the politicians would call "under achievement", it both allows people slack for their failures and reinforces negative self image. But the other critique of that answer is a little more subtle - and it's not a critique of the answer so much as the response to the answer. If the rich help the poor, they're saying that the poor need them, and they're putting the poor in an inequitable position. Not only that, it becomes more about the rich than the poor; we have $1,000 dollar a plate dinners to prevent starvation in Africa, or my favorite, a chalk message drawn on the sidewalk at Harvard proudly proclaiming, "Smores for Darfur, $2".

Patterns of Information Consumption

2007-12-18T09:56:00.000-08:00

A few centuries ago, there wasn’t as much history as there is today. That should be obvious, of course, because a few centuries of history have happened, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In the 14^th century, prior to the invention of the printing press, there wasn’t much that a person could really know. Books were closely guarded, and they were produced at a comparatively slow rate – about a thousand were published each year. In 2006, the world put out two hundred thousand new books. To put that in perspective, that mean that in six months we matched the entire 14^th century.

Before the printing press, knowledge of all kinds was confined to on of two things – a person, or a book. Since books were laboriously produced one at a time, they were almost as physically restrictive as a person. To get the information contained in either of these sources, you would have to seek it out in the real world, and hope that the book hadn’t burned, crumbled, rotted, or simply been misplaced. Because of these physical limitations on how data was accessed, knowledge and especially history tended to be geographically bound. A traveler would bring back stories, and those stories would be spread through the oral tradition, mutating into nearly unrecognizable forms. That was how people learned about other cultures, and even with the advent of the ambassador the common person would only know these things third or fourth hand.

The printing press changed things, but it took a long time, especially since literacy didn’t really catch on. With multiple copies of a book, information could be spread much faster. It was still confined, mind you, as only the most popular (or at least well funded) books would get the printing press treatment. The advent of newer and better methods of communication like the television and radio allowed one single (if still local) source to broadcast out to an entire community. Information was more free than ever, but it would take one more technology to fundamentally change human understanding one last time.

I’m speaking, of course, about the internet. Anyone who wants to say anything can say it there. Restrictions on free speech are limited only to the base and foul, and most of that gets put online anyway. Information doesn’t have to be filtered through an authority source anymore. If I want to know about the war, I can read a blog written by someone in the military, on the ground in Iraq. If I don’t trust that the information there is accurate, I can simply move on to the next blog, or follow trackbacks, comments, and criticisms. In a world where information was still constrained to physical form, this wouldn’t have been even remotely possible. Criticism of books was left to newspapers and magazines, with an interfering editorial process and more often than not an overlying capitalist agenda. There is more free information today than ever before, vast virtual archives of criticism, discussion, first hand experience, and the raw stuff of science.

Some might look at the world today and ask, “How did our ancestors get by without this stuff?” I look at the world today and think, “How are we able to process this?” Humans are eminently adaptable, true, but we weren’t built to handle the amount of information that’s coming at us. I mentioned at the beginning of this article that in six months of 2006 we matched the entire new published books output of the 14^th century. Yet the individual’s capacity for reading hasn’t improved much in that time. We aren’t, as a species, that much smarter than we were then – better nutrition has helped some, but only by a few IQ points. And while the 14^th century might have had information stored mostly in books, today we have movies, magazines, newspapers, television, and of course, the flood that is the internet. How are we handling it?

The initial promise of e-commerce was disintermediation – customers and businesses would be able to function more efficiently because the middle man would be cut out. In the realm of information processing, we’re seeing an opposite trend. Because so much is coming at us at once, we have to pick and choose what we’re going to pay attention to. Partly because of that, and partly because of the increase in advertising, there’s an overwhelming desire for reviewers – people who will tell us what’s important and what’s not. The nature of the internet allows us to take it a level beyond that. We can aggregate reviews, or review the reviewers, or listen to people with no qualifications or credentials. We have websites like Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes, that can tell us what the collective thinks.

That’s the clustering trend. The other trend is a divergent one. If you have an interest, there’s a website for it. The cost for making a website is nothing, so a person with an intense interest in, say, porcelain horses can create it and maintain it with no cost other than time. For people with niche interests, time is nearly meaningless. Then at person might find another website devoted to porcelain horses, and they would link to each other. This would continue until their community had grown up to be a certain size. In this way, knowledge and information can become as specialized as individual interests dictate. So can communities.

There’s a push and pull at work here between insularity and transience. It’s more visible in the virtual world than in the physical one, but it happens to people in both places. Especially in large cities, we can and do surround ourselves only with people who fall within the narrow confines of our interests and beliefs. This is the new world of humanity; we skim the big pools but confine ourselves to the places and people we define as “ours”. There’s more of everything than there ever was, but I fear that we’re experiencing only as much as we ever did.

Jetpacks (I want one)

2007-12-16T07:36:00.001-08:00

Well, it turns out that the future does have jet packs. It just also turns out that they're horrifically expensive. The price? $250,000 (with YouTube clip!). And they run on jet fuel, which is also probably not to cheap. But it gets 19 minutes of flight per fueling, which is pretty impressive compared to the last generation of jet pack. If I had the money, I would buy one, just so I could go flying in places that I wasn't supposed to. Then again, there can't be many laws in place restricting the use of jet packs, can there? So I could fly over traffic and cause a ruckus, or give myself jet pack assisted leaps across the tops of buildings.

Actually, it must be pretty easy to injure yourself in one of those things, especially with such hot exhaust coming out the back. I don't think it's like unassisted flight either - you have to be strapped in somehow, and unless it's bound quite close to your body it would be likely to pinch or pull at you.

The other great advance in human flight is the wingsuit, which yes, makes you look a flying squirrel. This is another one of those things for people with a money, as it costs about $1,000 for a wingsuit (with the more significant cost of getting a plane to take you up every time you want to come down, and a parachute). Given enough time for the materials sciences to advance, it might be possible for someone to land without a parachute. Though everyone in the business says that it could theoretically be done, I'll believe it when I see it.

Robots!

2007-12-16T07:29:00.000-08:00

There's something really fascinating about robots. There are a whole lot of people working on the problem of humanoid robots, and it won't be that long before they become efficient enough to do some jobs currently done by flesh and blood people. It's already happening in millions of factories, but when we see something that's just two joints attached to a welder, it doesn't do much to spark the imagination.

Human bodies are inefficient for most of the stuff that humans do in the modern world. Legs are a great example of this - we don't really need them most of the time. Wheels are a more effecient form of locomotion, so long as you're just traveling around flat places. Given the ever more handicap-accessible world, it doesn't make real sense for a robot to have legs in an urban environment. On top of that, gyroscopic technology is now at the point where we can have the wheel equivalent of bipedal locomotion - the Segway is exhibit number one of that. This further reduces the amount of space required for wheels.

Another way that robot bodies can improve on the human design is with the hand. To pick up any object requires a maximum of three "fingers". Two fingers are needed to grasp an object like a pole, and three fingers are needed to fully enclose a small object. And of course only a single finger is needed to poke something. Besides that, the designs just look cooler than the hand. We talk about the thumb being opposable, but with a robot hand all the digits can simply swivel around a base, making them all opposable to any other digit. Besides picking up and manipulating objects, the thing we use fingers for the most is data input, not just in the typical example of hammering away at a keyboard, but more subtle forms of data input like playing the violin or doing long division. Mathematics has already been completely outsourced to computers, and the ability of computers to reproduce sound has been proven to such an extent that it seems trivial to point it out. And yet people keep trying to make a robotic hand that looks like the human one.

Here are the arguments in favor of more human robots:

The Argument from Aesthetics
People tend to be uncomfortable with new things. If a robot looks at least a little like a human, people will be more accepting of it. This is especially important in the field of healthcare, one of the primary focuses of Japanese robotics. A humanoid robot is more pleasing to the eye, which means that it's actually worth solving some of the more unique engineering problems associated with that.

The Argument from Backwards Compatibility
Almost everything in modern civilization is designed for humans. In a way, humans represent the dominant form factor; an industry standard to which it's wise to comply. Having a robot made to those specs means that it is guaranteed to be able to interface with objects and machines that humans use. In almost all cases, this won't be the best solution - but once the generalized problem is solved, suboptimal solutions become cheap enough for that to not matter all that much. Think robot chauffeurs; they actually make sense if the economic variables are right, even though that solution makes much less sense than an on-board computer with sensors.

The Argument from Augmentation
Robotics doesn't just apply to robots. One of the major areas of advancement right now is in prosthetics. By making robot arms and hooking them up to people, a robotics company can expand its market by a large amount, as well as being able to secure both healthcare and defense grants.

Traffic Lights

2007-12-16T06:16:00.000-08:00

The traffic lights in my town aren't automated. They run on 80 second timers. For most of that time, they're red. Thirty seconds green, three seconds yellow, forty-seven seconds red. Someone timed it out that way for optimal traffic flow. When an ambulance comes through, they're surrounded by green lights, like a shaft of sunshine coming down on God's beloved. Then once they're gone all the lights reset back into their normal pattern.

The city is mostly grid shaped, but on a hill. One block is about 1/10th of a mile. Finding out the optimal speed for all green lights is just a matter of finding out how much their timing is offset by and doing a little bit of math. I'm almost tempted to step outside my house and find the nearest two traffic lights to that I can find out what the difference is. What really interests me about this is whether they're setting the lights to lower speeds to within legal limits, or whether they're doing it maximize traffic flow. Maybe both.

It's interesting to note that a staggered light system only has one speed you can consistently travel at keep hitting the greens. There's a thirty second variance in there of course, as you could go through one right after it changes from red and go through the other right before it changes to yellow. In a non-staggered system, where all of the lights in a column are the same color, there would be several speeds you could go to guarantee that you always got the green light. They would, however, be quite slow. An 80 second cycle with one light every block would have you traveling 4.5 miles per hour. You would be able to half that speed any number of times and still be hitting every green light. I think most of us would just gun it and see how many greens we could get through before it turned red on us again.

Also, when I was searching in vain for information about how the lights are programmed, I came across this lovely article about the effects of weather on street car traffic in Duluth, circa 1917. If I had $12 I would buy it.

The Implications of AuthorBot

2007-12-14T17:16:00.000-08:00

I like the idea of AuthorBot. Once I've learned enough, I'll at least make an attempt at PoetryBot, because people are generally more forgiving when your lines don't match up well (besides which, attempts have already been made for proof of concept). But more than AuthorBot, I like all the things that it could do that a normal person couldn't do as well.

Do you want someone to write a sequel to your favorite book? AuthorBot could analyze the writing patterns of that book, along with other novels that were written by the same author. It would be able to study sequels in general to find out what their common characteristics are. Then, once it had all this data, it would be able to extrapolate a new sequel to the book in question. It wouldn't have to stop with one sequel either - AuthorBot could write more and turn it into a trilogy, or a seven book cycle, or more.
There's already more books being published in a year than a person could read in a lifetime; with AuthorBot the number of books would be infinite.
This is not to say that a novel writing program would put all the human writers out of work. At least for now, there's a strong human repulsion to machines in any sort of creative or social context. Why? I'm not sure - some thoughts on that later.
If AuthorBot did write a sequel to a book, would this be a copyright violation? It would certainly be a derivative work. But if AuthorBot were sold as a program instead of as a service, then the book would only exist as potentiae, and it would no more be illegal to sell the program than it would be to sell a photocopier.
AuthorBot would have no artistic integrity. It's still not technically intelligent either, it just appears intelligent even on close inspection. As a result of not having any sort of morality, you could tell it to put out horrible dreck and modern masterpieces, and it would happily do either.
One way to make AuthorBot a lot more powerful would be to feed it metadata. Not only author's name, title of the work, year produced, and simple stuff like that, but also reviews, customer ratings, and things like that. This is already being done with Web 2.0 - it just needs a way to be fed in. It would also allow AuthorBot to know what books are "good" and what books are "bad", though it would likely find that those synonym groups depend on who's reviewing (which would lead to yet more clustering).
As mentioned previously, AuthorBot would be able to write in the style of another author - it would also be able to write when given certain criteria, such as a setting, time, theme, etc. This allows custom novels to be made to individual tastes.
On top of that, AuthorBot could scan a list in of authors that a person likes, and synthesize a novel that would appeal to their tastes (though it would have to fit the book into a cluster - while their are people who like Westerns and spy thrillers, combining the two wouldn't usually be the best way to go).
I don't really see AuthorBot being brought into the individual home. Because of how much power it would take to run it, I think that people more likely visit a website where they could order books that would either be micropublished or sent to an e-reader. The micropublishing option would cost more, of course.
Here's another thing; AuthorBot wouldn't have to care about copyrights, because it's dynamic instead of static. "Writing" a book would take comparatively little of its time. The real draw is its dynamic nature, so it might actually be best to let people freely share the e-book version to draw in more customers.

What Evolution Means

2007-12-14T07:49:00.001-08:00

Evolution doesn't mean what you think it means. It's an emergent property of systems, a high level phenomenon. As stated by Darwin in The Origin of Species, if a system has the following three qualities:

1. Geometric ratio of increase
2. Mutation
3. Selective Forces

then transitions in the makeup of the population will take place. It makes no sense to say that one organism is more evolved than any other organism because organisms don't evolve. Only populations do that. At best, we can say that an organism is more adapted to its environment than another organism. We can't even say that a population is more evolved than another population, unless we also state that what we mean by "evolved" is "more adapted to a particular environment".

The other big term is "evolving". This makes sense if we view the term as "being selected for traits which the majority population does not posses", but even that's a muddy definition. What people really mean is "better in a good way". Unfortunately, there isn't a good existing word for this, so evolution was taken in. There's a strong need for that sort of word too, especially in this era of constant innovation and change. In part, the problem was exacerbated by the co-opting of biological terms by the tech industry; they refer to their technology and programs in terms of generations (especially videogames - I'm ready to strangle the person who came up with "next-gen" as a buzzword). While I might accept calling these generations, they lack the first two criteria of evolution. We could, however, refer to evolution when looking at the population of gadgets, as the population fits all three criteria (selection in this case being market forces).

Why Privacy is a Bad Thing

2007-12-13T16:32:00.000-08:00

Imagine a (magical) computer program that could store every action taken by every individual throughout their entire lifetime. It would record information about what they bought, what they ate, who they talked to, what they said, various bioinformation like heart rate, cholesterol levels, etc.

Now imagine that this computer stores all this information with a series of tags, and the tags have their own meta-tags, so that information can be pulled out of this database with high efficiencies and assembled into useful charts, graphs, and patterns.

From the database, we could then find hidden relationships. We could look for where things cluster, such as seeing that people who eat a specific type of canned soup have a 20% higher incidence of cancer. We could track epidemics in real-time. More importantly, we could track the epidemics that people aren't really interested in self-disclosing (STDs, obesity, addiction). There would be sociological implications too, as we could see correlations in the data that would tell us the causes (or impacts) of things like abusive husbands, suicides, or even successful marriages. And of course there would be numerous commercial applications, such as finding out how effective advertising really is, tailoring products to specific demographics, fine tuning production to be more in line with consumption.

Right now, billions of dollars are spent on analysis every year. Focus groups are formed, surveys are given out, and the real world is studied as closely as possible. This magical computer system would eliminate all of that. Here's the thing; corporations are already doing their best to study trends. So is the medical community. So is the government. The benefits of trend analysis are immense. It's only recently that computers have made dynamic trend analysis a real possibility; it used to a series of single studies was performed to determined specific things. Now? We can take reams of data and crunch it in all sorts of interesting ways.

The problem for our theoretical magic computer is twofold. The first problem is that people don't want to give up information about themselves. This is understandable really, because people sometimes do things that are illegal, stupid, or socially unacceptable (sometimes all three at once!). But so long as it can be guaranteed that this information isn't going to be available to the people around you, we've eliminated the last two concerns.

It's that first concern, the "illegal" things, that we have the biggest problem on. Here we come to a basic problem with the law; sometimes laws are made that people don't follow. Jaywalking is the classic example. We also know that there's a general rule that you can go five miles above the speed limit. And nearly everyone I know has at least dabbled in file sharing. So either these laws need to change, or people need to not be prosecuted for these minor infractions (which is what happens now).

The second problem is that most major organizations hold their information as proprietary. Technically this isn't really a problem when we have a computer run on magic, but in reality there needs to be a company (or government) behind the computer. Google already stores every search that you type in, along with all of your mail if you use Gmail, and all of your documents if you use Google Docs, and that holds true for every service that they offer. They use this information to data mine and better advertise to you. But do they share this information with any other company? Of course not.

There's no sense giving your competitor an edge. Unless, of course, you can trade the advantages you have so that both you and your competitor increase profits, which is exactly what would happen if data sharing went on.

But let's track back to you, the consumer, the citizen, the person who cares about privacy. There are reasons for privacy beyond those of "getting caught". For some, it's a matter of not trusting that any big organization is going to be looking out for your interests. That's a valid concern, but it's my belief that the goals of the government and the people are in alignment most of the time. If not, the cost of fucking with the individual needs to be high (in the form of boycotting, protest, or homegrown terrorism if it comes to that). For others, it's a matter of some vague philosophical notion of a private space, to which I say that the benefits to humanity are too great to ignore. Besides that, already happening.

Of course, my opinion might have its basis in my love of data analysis, which borders on fanatical.

AuthorBot

2007-12-10T10:05:00.000-08:00

So let's say that you take the sum of all human English literature, and feed it into a computer program. Would that computer program, if properly written, be able to make judgments about the nature of literature? My guess is yes. The tricky part is the "if properly written" clause.

When we talk about emergent properties, we're talking about properties that arise from a system, rather than properties that are encoded in the system. Some people would call this "high level phenomenon". What I want to talk about isn't emergent properties, but something that's sort of the opposite; deriving basic system rules from an examination of relevant data. This is something that we do all the time in the sciences. We conduct studies to try to figure out what's really going on in the world. This is the basis for the scientific method.

Literature isn't something that we really need to figure out the basic rules on. As humans, we naturally know language, and our understanding of it doesn't come from the basic rules but from patterns that get built up in our brains. Humans are naturally suited to language from birth. That's why it takes babies so little time to go from gibberish to forming words and sentences; they do this without knowing what a word or sentence is. It makes a lot of sense really, because how could someone tell them what a word or sentence is without using language in the first place? Language is an emergent property of the way the human brain is structured. The structure of the human brain is an emergent property of our genetic code: your DNA doesn't code for every single neuron in your brain. This dynamic system that doesn't depend on hard-coding is why the human brain (and body) can handle all sorts of different experiences and environments. And on top of that, what DNA codes for is in the long run determined by another emergent property called evolution.

I've digressed. Let me bring it back; in the first generation of artificial intelligence, programmers attempted to hard code hundreds and thousands of rules, hoping to make something intelligent. They failed, for the simple reason that intelligence is an emergent property. Perhaps the logic was that by piling so many rules and their exceptions on top of each other, something could be produced that resembled intelligence. This is the main argument that philosopher John Searle puts forth against the possibility of so-called "strong AI" (read: human level). He says that a mere system of rules can't produce intelligence, because it wouldn't be anything more than what was put into it. I would agree, so long as we confine our definitions of artificial intelligence to programs which can't create their own rules.

So then, to create intelligence, we need a system that can develop its own rules. What I want to make is a program that can understand literature. The rules (other than a few bootstrap and admin rules) will be developed from a vast amount of data rather than us designing rules that create emergence. The idea is that the bootstrap rules will be able to look at repeating sequences and statistical correlations to make new rules.

So we feed the program 88,000 books. I use this number only for example, and because it's the number of e-books currently supported by the Amazon Kindle. The program runs through a book, notes statistically significant repetitions, and analyzes for structure. For example, if we assume that the computer starts without knowing words or grammar, then running through the book the program would make a note of the ways in which characters are arranged. It would see that certain letters appear in certain ways. For example: Q is usually followed by U; X is usually preceded by E or A; one space is rarely followed by another; quote symbol usually has another quote symbol close by; strings of characters are ended with a period. These are basic rules, rules that the program can figure out without knowing anything about the system itself. The program still wouldn't know what a word is. But if, through one of our hard-coded admin rules, we ask it whether a set of characters is likely to have a space or punctuation on either side of it, it would be able to give us a pretty judgment of that (which is how we would define a word in a pure character way).

The next step, once the program has written new rules into itself about what it believes to be valid constructions in our system, is for the program to go up a level. It would have to look at sequences of letters that are appearing and determine both their frequency and location within the data set. For example, it would have to see that "cat" appears both as a word (separated by spaces/punctuation), set in among other characters (as an unrelated thing), or as part of another word (in compounds). In the example of "cat", it would see "cat", "catty", "categorically", "scat", etc. But it would also see that the sequence "categorically" appears almost exclusively as a word. So from that, the program would derive rules about word frequency.

From a study of which words appear where, it would have to be able to derive other properties. It would find out that punctuation marks are significant to determining word order. And when looking at word order, it would eventually (with the application of statistics) find that certain types of words tend to follow other types of words. Nouns are usually followed by verbs, and vice versa (with adjectives sometimes separating them). It would be able to see that many words share character sequences within them and at certain location within the sequence - we call these prefixes and suffixes. Both of those, along with word locations in relation to other word locations, are essential to knowing whether a thing is a verb, noun, adjective, etc.

So far this is all stuff that we could hardcode, and to be sure, scientists have laboriously done it. Those programs could make words without spelling errors (usually pulled from a dictionary database) and sentences with proper grammar (those being emergent). Intelligence it was not. The next stumbling block for our theoretical program is the big one; meaning. That's what separates a clever trick like making sentences from something really astounding.

How would the program determine meaning? This is why we need thousands of books. By analyzing where words show up in relation to each other, and figuring out that some words with the same root are statistically correlated despite prefixes and suffixes (such as like and likely), the program can come up with a new rule that postulates those derivations to be synonymous. By looking at words that show up near each other, and the ways they do so, the program would be able to postulate both synonyms and antonyms. It would make new rules for tenses and new rules for view. With a large enough data set, the muddy rules of English could be mapped automatically. It still wouldn't really know what anything meant, but it would be able to see make rules that describe patterns. It would know that dog can be preceded by fat or skinny, and that, once preceded by that, it will often be preceded by it again (or one of it's synonyms). And with enough of these associations, it would see when one synonym set tends to be associated with another synonym set. In that way, it would get to "know" (make new predictive rules) about things. For example, cats are agile, or rocks are hard.

So we have grammar rules, and we have a rudimentary form of meaning, so it's likely that this program could make a sentence like "The rock is hard." But the real challenge is to produce multiple sentences that maintain a thought. Again, we need statistical analysis to give our program this rule. This is analysis at the same level as earlier levels, just bigger. It would have to know types of sentences. And once it got those, it would have to see (again, through statistical analysis), that sentences vary within a paragraph, rarely repeating their types. Of course, it would also need to define "paragraph", but that wouldn't be too hard if we've come this far; a paragraph is any group of sentences that are separated by the carriage return symbol.

So once it knows both what a paragraph is, and how they are typically structured, it needs to look at chapters, and section breaks, and entire books, and compare and contrast those both within and without their containing structures. Patterns would emerge, and those would be codified into further rules (ones that are much more muddy than the lower level rules). Here comes another tricky part; once it knows all of these rules, that might be enough. It might be able to write a halfway decent novel from that. But if it isn't enough, then it needs to be able to figure out (again, through pattern analysis) that words talk about each other, both explicitly and implicitly. And once it understood that ... well, the world would be its oyster.

Imagine the following; "AuthorBot, write me a three hundred page novel in the style of Dickens, set in 1970s New York." A few seconds later, you're printing it out for easy reading. That's the end goal, but as you see there are many layers that need to be built up for it to happen. This is all under the assumption that meaning can be derived solely by looking at a language, without any knowledge of the outside world. And someday, when my brain is big and strong, and the computers can handle the data flow, I'll program it (unless someone does it first). Consider; Moore's law predicts that in about ten years, computers will be 100 times more powerful than they are today.

If it's possible, it will be done.

Future Shock

2007-12-06T12:36:00.000-08:00

I've been rereading Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, and it seems odd how much of it is still relevant and how much falls flat. This won't be a critique of the predictions made by a book that's now 37 years old*, don't worry about that. What interests me more is how little of the future it was actually possible to see from the past. Of course, my real interest lies in finding out how to mitigate those problems when looking at our own future. There are all sorts of predictions which come out every year that are just plain wrong, and I think we can pretty safely ignore them, but the ones that come close to revealing the truth might offer some real insight.

Toffler talks a lot about the throwaway society; most of the things we have get replaced at a rapid rate. He's not just talking about material goods, although he makes that case too. He's talking about friendships, jobs, and culture. Starting with the automobile making its entrance into the mass market, humans became more geographically independent. We no longer had to stay in one place if we didn't want to. This meant a lot not only for tourism, but for moving; if you were tired of the city that you were living in, or ostracized by your community, you could simply leave with a minimum of hassle.

On top of this geographical freedom came occupational freedom; the trends started moving towards jobs that lasted years instead of a lifetime. The average time for a programmer to work at any given place in Silicon Valley is now eighteen months. People started to go back to school, or change their careers in the middle of their lives. We were no longer defined by what work we did. Of course, we often choose to define ourselves by what we do, so long as we enjoy our occupation. And in the year 2007, education defines most occupations, because new technology comes down the line that improves efficiency at the cost of training and implementation. This is true even for the most basic of jobs; farms now use multi-million dollar equipment, the service industry uses computer interfaces, and most manufacturing jobs have been revolutionized if not outright replaced.

Geographical and occupational freedom had a major impact on both family and friendship. Friendships that happen over a distance inevitably break down, so the people who aren't tied down to any given place aren't tied down to any given friendship. Friendships are more transitory, with more friends at the cost individual friendship depth. This is common criticism of American culture, a society which has perhaps the greatest geographical and occupational freedom of any (mostly due to our size, rather any superior form of government).

Viewing these arguments in light of the Internet is confusing to say the least. Here we have a system of friendship which is completely independent of geographical location, on top of institutions and possessions which are also independent of geography. My Gmail account, for example, can be used from any computer which has an internet connection. It's outlasted my first computer and will probably outlast my second one too. I still agree that friendships depend on proximity to an extent, but not nearly as much as they used to. As audio, video, and later haptics come onto the scene, physical proximity will mean less and less as virtual proximity comes closer and closer to "the real scene".

Lastly, my favorite chapter on rereading Future Shock was the one on the "adhocracy". This is closely related to the concept of Web 2.0, and it's such a catchy phrase that I'm not sure why it hasn't caught on. People organize into organic structures of control, from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs. While I have my criticisms of Wikipedia, that's generally how it works over there. The amount of volunteer work that goes into the internet in general in terms of moderation, tagging, and free content is astounding. On top of that, the internet is itself ad hoc organized with an organic structure; while an individual website might have hierarchical page structure, the system of links creates a very messy structure.

Messy, but it gets you to the right place most of the time.

*Future Shock was published in 1970 for those without strong math.

I Call It "Technovulsion"

2007-11-30T20:22:00.000-08:00

So many of my friends are something that there's not a real good term for. I would call it technophobia, except that word has the implication of current technologies. It also has this connotation of ineptitude and foolishness. Maybe that's just my take on it. Regardless, it just doesn't feel right to call them that, when it's not anywhere near being a consensus label.

Our conversations will go something like this:
Them: (some new technology)
Me: Yeah, and in five years it'll either be obsolete or used by everyone
Them: That seems sort of sad.
Me: Why? We'll be able cure most diseases, eliminate scarcity, and upgrade our minds.
Them: But at what cost?
Me: Uh ... I'm not sure what you mean.
Them: If we put things into our head, don't we become less human?
Me: No? Do you become less human because they use pencils?

Of course I know that's a slippery slope; just because we use pencils to enhance our human functionality doesn't mean that augmenting our memory or intellect is automatically okay. If there's a way to convince people that we're more than our bodies, I don't know what it is, short of pulling the mind out of the body. It isn't just messing with the brain that makes them squeamish though; it's the domination of technology. Not the current domination of technology though, the future domination.

This is a theme that runs throughout our culture though, particularly in the sci-fi and action genres. I Robot, Terminator, Jurassic Park, The Matrix, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and pretty much every zombie movie made - all of them show the horrors of knowing "what man was not meant to know". And those are the explicit ones; there are many more movies, books, and television shows which have more subtle applications of that principle.

I think the atomic bomb is somewhat to blame for this.

The Future Is Now

2007-11-30T16:30:00.000-08:00

Why don't we see the marvels of human engineering?

I guess you could ask the same about the natural world, but human engineering has, to me, a sort of immediacy to it, a sense of pride and promise, especially when you look at everything that has yet to come. A quick peek at what life was like 200 years ago shows how dramatically things have changed; there was no electricity, no indoor plumbing, no plastics, no cars, no radiation (that's a bad thing), no computers, no television, no stainless steel, no telephone, no radio, no ... well, the list is pretty exhaustive. Basically, everything that's of any importance to you if you live in the industrialized world. Your life right now is utterly controlled by technology.

"But wait!" you say, "I'm not technically literate*. I don't own a computer, car, television, telephone, or any other piece of electronics." Ah, but you shop from places which sell goods made by machines which couldn't have existed 200 hundred years ago. Even the basic manufacturing processes didn't exist back than. Nor did the transport vehicles, let alone the transport systems, needed to get that product to your door. And if you get water or gas from a major company, not only are they getting those resources through comparatively new technologies, but those systems are probably managed by computers.

The upshot is that we don't even have to go back 200 years, or 100 years, or even 50 years to find things that we couldn't live without. Granted, the further back you go, the more you would be missing out on - but the new technologies are running the old technologies. The chair you're sitting in is probably made with stainless steel (1904), plastic (1950s), and some sort of synthetic upholstery (1940s), designed on a computer (1970s), put together with robots (1954) and assembly lines (1920s), shipped by something with a diesel engine (1892), put into a shop which ordered it either online (1980s) or through the telephone (1876), and finally got by you. And if you paid with a credit card (1958), then that entire system of payment wouldn't be possible without modern technology.

This is all obvious stuff that we just don't think about too often. Even more profound is the fact that in 1995 the internet had 19,000 websites - in just twelve years that's ballooned to more than 50,000,000,000. Considering how much it's used by everyone in the industrialized world, even those who don't use it directly, how can we not look at this advancement and marvel at what it is to be human? How can we not yearn for the future?

*In which case I have no idea why you're reading a blog.

First Post!

2007-11-30T16:20:00.000-08:00

I've had this recurring trend lately where I can't find anyone to talk to about the things that really matter to me. Not the personal stuff, because there really isn't much of that anymore, but things like information systems, the changing world of technology, the failures of both lower and higher education, the fourth dimension, and lots of stuff which I read about. There's this glazed over look that people get in their eyes when I'm talking to them that tells me I've gone beyond the polite indulgences of normal conversation.

This isn't my first blog. If I'm being realistic, I would say that it's going to last around twenty to thirty posts, encompassing maybe two weeks of my time. That means that if you're reading this, it's probably long after it's stopped being updated. No matter; this is more for my benefit than yours.

More biographical information as it becomes relevant, or just Google me; my name is Ben Friesen, but I usually go by the alias Alexander Wales (run it together as one word).