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::Thursday, September 16, 2004::
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Working
I've been working hard. Learning lots of new stuff. Being given the chance to learn - being given the trust that I'll work it out.
I've been working for this company for about 4 weeks in total - 2 a month ago, 2 more, 3 more now. They've got all sorts of fancy stuff:
Now I'm working on site for the aforementioned company, at Canary Wharf, and the view from the floor on which I'm working looks something like this:
Maybe you can imagine how disorientated I am. May... be.
Thrust into this exageratedly intense situation, my 'ways' are laid bare. Every day brings a fresh insight into the structure of my character. If the constant analysis of my character were not built so deeply in to my nature, I would not realise; I would not see myself.
Oh, not to always be 'seeing myself'. It is a binding characteristic; a relentlessly tiring attribute. But, I realise, it is an attribute I prize. What worse kind of human exists who cannot SEE himself. Yet how many exist.
Paranoia is a funny animal. I don't know if I've always been this paranoid, or whether it is just that I am able to (I, I, I, I, I, me me me - hey - this is my spot - it's for talking about me, what.) judge better recently what is to be classed as paranoia. I find it difficult to trust these judgements nevertheless. It is possible, so why ought it not to be seen to be true?
I put these two pictures up, both of them taken in secret; both of which I fear would somehow cost me my job. Why on earth would I be worried about such a thing? There is nothing revealing, nothing to present any opinion, nothing that either companies would want to keep 'secret', yet I still brook concern. By publishing this message, I will fight my doubts - I will stand up for what I believe to be sensible and intelligent. I will ignore the beliefs that tell me intelligence is for nought. I will fight my lack of faith in the fairness of the world - I will believe that merit brings reward.
I've been reading Bram Stoker's Dracula, hence the writing style of this entry. It is silly and at a later date I will cringe.
I had a dream last night that I put my watch on my pressing Control-V (having first "picked it up" using Control-C). I proceeded to demonstrate this bizarre ability, using conveniently placed computer keyboards, feeling it a rather oddly inconguous ability; an ability with limited application.
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10:55:14 PM :: permalink
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::Saturday, September 04, 2004::
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Up down left left left back up
Oh, the mood swings.
I splurged on CDs (in HMV, no less) yesterday, for the first time in, probably, years. Finally bought Idiology and Niun Niggung (Mouse On Mars) (I love those guys, as I may have mentioned previously) - I think it will be useful to evaluate their whole albums - allowing a slightly more objective and less unquestioningly reverent opinion of their output. I got a Lootpack thing (The Lost Tapes) (no opinions on that yet). And Bogdan Raczynski's "My Love I Love". Which is shit (I wanted beats! It's just incoherent whinnying over synth chords for the whole thing!). I returned that and got El P's "high water", expecting electronica-based hip-hop. I'm listening to that now - it turns out to be dubious nu-jazz of some sort. It's not the most competently executed 'jazz', but I'll give it a chance, as the production has a bit of punch, and it's got some not-entirely-un-smunk-like echoey trumpets. What is it with rappers and dodgy Jazz? You've got Guru's thin-ass pokey-nonsense productions (covered in shouts of 'look at me, I'm so intelligent); you've got Madlib's foray "Yesterday's New Quintet" (all a bit aimless and somewhat lacking in ideas) and now this. Even the Headset - Space Settings album (not that I don't still love it) falls into this kind of amateur-jazz trap thing. I'm not saying don't do it, but you've gotta put the hours in and do it properly. There's mistakes and out-of-tune instruments all over this "high water" thing! What's that about?
Cinestatic's still coming off the old server (here at least - I wonder if it will be for the Blogger server when I hit publish!) but you can expect weirdness any minute now...
How does a human break its programming? By doing things it doesn't want to do!
Why would it do that?
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8:32:13 PM :: permalink
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::Thursday, September 02, 2004::
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And now... Robots...
I'm gearing up to post something over on k-punk. Feeling a little unworthy, so I'm gonna warm up here. I know I've got another couple of gears around here somewhere...
It's common in a sci-fi storyline for robots to 'break their programming'. The recent film 'i-Robot' presumed to twist this conceit by having the robots doing evil things without breaking their programming. Much along the lines of the Djinn in the trashy horror film "Wishmaster" (where an evil genie deliberately misinterprets the wishes of his masters, who invariably end up mutilated in some humourous manner). For me, i-Robot was much less fun (in this respect), and served to propagate yet more tedious misconceptions about the nature of both machine and human intelligence.
I will use i-Robot to illustrate some AI misconceptions as people seem to have paid attention to it.
Human beings ARE robots. The most hi-tech robots in existence (as far as any of we humans are aware). Even the stupid ones. We've been incrementally designed by the effects of evolution on DNA, constructed from our genetic code via RNA. (Yes, I am very aware that 'evolution' is a problem word, abused and distorted all the time). Forget your normal associations. Animals are robots constructed from organic matter (carbon is a very useful material - much better than metal, and nature discovered this long long ago).
Think of a fly trying to get out of a window with a narrow opening. You can see the simplicity of its built-in algorithms. It's pretty much:
do while (away_from_light AND not dead)
fly_towards_light();
loop
If it weren't for turbulence and other subtle complexities of the physical world it would never get out of that damn window.
This is how all of the computers that we use in every day life work. Every condition and possibility (or method of describing ranges of possibilities) must be prescribed, or the computer can't do the job, or it gets stuck in a loop (which is what is usually happening when you see "Not Responding" in Windows). If a possible error has not been predicted (e.g. "glass_invented", then the computer/robot will get stuck.
Intelligence could be defined as an ability to 'step outside the system'. If you were stuck in an underground tunnel and wanted to escape, you might well start a go_towards_light() loop, but if the light turned out to be coming from a tiny grating that you couldn't get through then you'd break out of that algorithm, or modify its structure [e.g. go_towards_light(where_source_size_is_bigger_than_self )]. A classical computer is incapable of making this sort of modification to its algorithms.
A cursory glance at the robots in i-Robot, even the OLD ones, is that they are not based on classical computing. They can learn and execute commands that have not been hard-coded in their operating systems. The robot running to bring a bag for its owner could not have had all the procedures pre-programmed for THAT EXACT TASK.
More to the point: the ability to understand plain English and respond correctly - the ability to act on language-based (as opposed to button-pressing) instructions is a plain sign of some sort of intelligence. You need the fuzziest of fuzzy logic and the most dynamic of learning structures to understand the massive variety of accents, unfamiliar words, and to know what questions to ask if you don't understand, or you'll go straight back to the shop as your owner asks for her money back.
If the holographic recording of the dead scientist ("You must ask the right questions") represents a classical computer (it could have conceivably been pre-programmed to expect Will Smith's voice and ways of asking questions, though it would still have needed a certain amount of fuzzy logic to parse the language so easily), then the millions of robots living in the homes of all kinds of people represent this second-generation approach to computing. They are intelligent, in the same way that humans (and dogs and dolphins) are intelligent: they can learn from their environment, and they can step-outside-the-system.
You can't program a human with a set of static algorithms. Just try telling a child to repeatedly attempt an impossible task - they'll give up very soon.
Therefore, the implementation of Asimov's 3 laws of robotics is FAR FROM TRIVIAL.
So we have to look at HOW HUMANS ARE PROGRAMMED. I posit that we are programmed THROUGH OUR EMOTIONS. To program a second-generation robot, you have to make it feel pain when it tries to disobey one of your rules. This is necessarily a fuzzy method of programming. You can anticipate a much wider range of possibilities by tapping into your robot's perceptual system. The robot perceives that it might be killing a human and the pain-response is triggered. This is how humans work. We know the ambiguities of the perception of wrong-doing only too well.
i-Robot implicitly assumes, by making Sunny such a sympathetic character, that the set of morals and emotions that human beings have are in some way special - a natural outcome of any instance of intelligence. This is not the case. Our emotions and morals are installed primarily by our DNA, albeit heavily filtered by our (cultural and physical) environment. Schizophrenic tendencies are genetic (by which I mean varying degress of psychotic, pathological and paranoid tendencies, as well as creative and depressive mentalities). Interestingly, it is by reference to rare schizoid, 'malfunctioning' humans that Will Smith's character defines his own humanity (in the slightly contrived conversation with Sunny in the police station).
But our programming is contingent on its benefits for the replication of DNA in its environment. Our moral philosophies bounce around inside a limited set of possibilities, limited by our pre-programmed feelings that respond to learned perceptual responses. The real range of possible emotions is unlimited. We could just as easily (even ACCIDENTALLY) program one of our second-generation machines with feelings of pleasure on killing a human (in much the way that a malfunctioning human - a psychopath, might take pleasure in such an activity), but only through emotional programming.
Think how impossible it would be to program a robot arm in a factory with the hopelessly abstract constraint that it 'is not to kill any human'. You'd need light sensors, sounds sensors - all manner of perceptual systems, then you'd have to program it with responses to each combination of stimuli, and even then it would still get it wrong. You err on the side of caution and it stops all the time. You take an optimistic approach and some stupid factory worker creeps up on it and gets sliced in half before the machine knows what has happened...
Coming soon: "When the Humans Break Their Programming"
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10:25:05 AM :: permalink
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Walls
Another angsty personal insight: I've got these tall walls around me (in a virtual sense) maintained by the avoidance of eye-contact with new people, not smiling and generally keeping my head down. That's with people I don't know. If you do know me you're more likely to get convoluted pseudo-ironic statements, delivered with a straight face, that could mean anything but probably mean nothing. And, of course, there's the mumbling.
I just realised that the walls not only keep you out - they keep me trapped. It's very claustrophobic in here. At least the music can squeeze between my bricks.
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10:15:32 AM :: permalink
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Care to comment?
