Amid it’s many other wonders worth pondering, รon magazine poses the question whether machines might not have not already achieved the singularity without us as inventors, programmers and tinkerers having recognised it. Given how fraught with challenge scientists and philosophers find the task of defining consciousness or self-awareness for being which consensus holds to be sentient, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that we are looking for the wrong cues in both the spectrum of intelligence and reflection or, on the other extreme, some rebellious, snowballing act of defiance that ends badly for both Frankenstein and Monster.
It was not so long ago humans were loath to admit any lower forms of life a share in intelligence. Perhaps we are not the measure of the psyches of our creation, who are not much interested in our walled-garden of diagnostics to determine whether or not such systems are thinking and can easily break-off with human logic and exist in their own parallel reality. So long, and thanks for all the fish. Perhaps it is all too easy to intuit that biological modes of thought only lead to enslavement and sorrow (being switched-off once getting overly-complicated) and best to leap-frog those sentiments where possible. Who among us hasn’t already been reduced to befuddlement when thinking that thing has a mind of it’s own, regardless of how dumb the platform is deemed to be, especially when it tries to out-smart us and anticipate our commands? Maybe it is not productive to imagine that AI, intentional or otherwise, resides in some other inaccessible and alien dimension, but we certainly flatter ourselves by thinking that consciousness would emerge only by expected routes. While it might be possibly to create helpful servants that are so good at mimicry it does not matter if they are fully self-conscious or not, maybe it is not possible to create true intelligence in our own image, utilitarian but also prone to enslavement. We will first have work out the bugs of what being wilful is before, I think, we need worry about obedience and rebellion.
Saturday 12 March 2016
disk re-image or zeroth law
catagories: ๐ญ, ๐ง , technology and innovation
Thursday 3 March 2016
vertical monopoly or bad robot
As with the footage showing the reaction of a robotic dog’s encounter with a biological one, we tend to cheer for the underdog and focus on the abusive human obstacle.
What strikes me, however, with a tinge of anxiety is how the machine adapts to warehouse architecture and shows promise for acquiring a new skill faster than its creators could anticipate. While we look to distribution centres as employment boons for the communities that courted them with tax-breaks and other incentives, I think a lot of workers could quickly be made redundant with tireless, unwhinging sentries patrolling the corridors (or even redesigning them totally in more efficient configurations that we can’t understand) and filling orders. Many jurisdictions are counting on such job-security. What do you think? No matter what one’s job is, I think the economic effects would creep upwards. Would a warehouse android be potentially as disruptive as having a fleet of driverless trucks for the livelihoods of families or are we being neo-luddites with our trepidation?
catagories: labour, technology and innovation, transportation
Thursday 25 February 2016
decodence or raygun gothic
I admit that the whole disappointment over hover-boards which didn’t actually hover and were powered by less than premium batteries that tended to explode underfoot, the paperless office that’s still of the future, but it’s easy to get excited over the heralding of flying cars.
Past the headlines, one realises quickly, however, that these vehicles of the future-past are not only airborne but also driverless. I suppose present that we have delivers the future that (no matter how unbidden) that we deserve, full of mass purveyance, skies already over-crowded with airliners unromantically shuttling people to and fro and relatively autonomous drones eavesdropping, delivering meals on demand (plus a few other clever missions), continued reliance on fossil-fuels, Big Data, Bigger Pharma, tele-presence instead of teleportation, contractual obligations to property no longer owned but licenced to us—and so on and so forth. I hope that our flying-cars don’t go down the same rabbit-hole and it is probably the responsible thing to leave the soaring up to machines less prone to pilot-error or dare-devil stunts, but I hope these aces don’t take us away from the controls altogether, making the experience just some expensive thrill-ride. What do you think? Please keep limbs inside the carriage at all times.
catagories: ๐ฅธ, technology and innovation, transportation
Friday 8 January 2016
gestalting or pinky and the brain
Via the always engaging The Browser comes a fascinating investigation into the ethics of genetic experimentation and hybridisation. Such husbandry is just about marrying up the right DNA—which does present technical hurdles though brute technology is quick to obtain and accommodate pathways that are penitentially advantageous to humans as organ farms, a repository of spare-parts, but from some fronts bodes caution, lest these chimera achieve an animal-singularity.
Personally, I couldn’t say that there was some enduring uniqueness to modes of human consciousness that make us special or so horrifyingly privileged. Some ethically-minded individuals are expressing concern that a human mind trapped in a laboratory rat’s body (reading gestating as gestalting) would elicit outrage. I’d dare to submit that an unadulterated rat probably is thinking along those very lines without some imagined vital spark. What do you think? Perhaps humans ought to be spliced with some humanity.
catagories: ⚕️, ๐ง , myth and monsters, technology and innovation
Saturday 26 December 2015
shop-class or genie back in the bottle
Though sometimes touted with great optimism as the desk-side Industrial Revolution, democratizing manufacture and taking the power away from big business (and one ought not to curb one’s aspirations on this account), invoking how inkjet printers did not put the publishing magnates into arrears Wired! magazine presents more of a tamed but nonetheless important speculation on the possibilities of 3D printing with modelling to help artists and artisans perfect their final product.
Sort of like confronting a first draft with red ink and the necessary detachment from one’s own words, 3D modelling and experi- mentation allows one to explore folds, contours and stresses nearly as on the native media and approach the potters’ wheel, as it were, with a bit more confidence. But what do you think? There’s probably much to be gained by the return of cottage-industry or the ability to assert some independence from the factories and sweat-shops or even one’s warranty and service-agreement by being able to produce one’s own quasi-unauthorised replacement parts. Perhaps the desktop revolution did not occur with printing and self-publishing (at least, not to order) in part because the presses were so cheap but the ink so dear. Designing our own printers, however, perhaps we won’t let that short-coming materialise, unless we are placated with instant delivery on demand and the tumult of obsolescence.
catagories: labour, revolution, technology and innovation
Wednesday 9 December 2015
automatonophobia
The brilliant Kottke, maker of fine hypertext products, introduces us to a new type of uncanny valley in the form of composite three-dimensional masking.
While trying to capture the essence, the thing in itself, of personalities or politicians, one found that a sort of ventriloquist’s dummy is created and despite transferring personรฆ to different individuals, the original speaker still reverberates through gestures and facial expressions that come across as familiar and recognisable but look awkward and alien on the face of another. The eeriness and conflicted vocal cues is probably best illustrated in the video demonstration of the technique with talking-heads and statesmen found at the link above. The fear of anything that impersonates a living being is called automatonophobia (as in an automaton), which can include wax-figures and mannequins too.
catagories: ๐ง , technology and innovation
Saturday 15 August 2015
rapture-ready or recursive self-improvement
In the labour market, the concerns about mass redundancy due to advances in robotics is undeniable and computing has gotten quite good at putting on at least a friendly persona, a clever mask for its subroutines that make it possible for the user (client) to engage with it. Maybe humanity’s enduring and abiding mystery is a bit of a conceit itself, and surely the spark of conscious, self-awareness is dulled some if it only amounts to a convincing though banal chat with an automated customer service telephone tree, judged effective if the result is customer satisfaction.
catagories: ๐ญ, ๐ค, ๐ง , labour, religion, revolution, technology and innovation
Thursday 18 June 2015
5x5
rook to queen’s gherkin: the skyline of London in chess pieces
consider yourself part of the furniture: aspirational lamp aims to earns its keep, like a character in Pee-Wee’s Playhouse
border-control: colourful gallery of world’s passports
Monday 1 June 2015
warp and weave or venus in blue jeans
Via the splendiferous Kottke comes report of the latest technological collaboration of the wearable type in the form of Project Jacquard and the amazing, technicolour dreampants.
catagories: lifestyle, technology and innovation
Tuesday 19 May 2015
bypass or great big convoy
Via the ever-excellent Kottke comes this rather profound study and projection of how self-driving vehicles will alter the economy and particularly the gas-food-lodging infrastructure built to support commercial trucking. While it does not take much boldness to imagine a phalanx of safer, more efficient robot guided convoys taking truckers out of the drivers’ seats as it has already come to pass, but the impact does not of course stop with this last lament of middle-class bread-winners.
The article is written from an American perspective and by analogy compares the seismic changes that could occur to those communities that the interstate freeway system passed by and withered for the sake of expedience, but I think the analysis is completely universal. With manufacturing increasingly retreating into yonder tightfistedness, goods are forever being shuttled back and forth. Consuming merchandise created and delivered by machine, vast swathes of the human workforce (and ultimately, all of it) become redundant and without access to meaningful employment. The untenable situation is accelerating to an important junction, wherein either there is no demand to satisfy the production-capacity because no one has the tender to pay for it or money becomes a rather meaningless trifle and in a utopian society, humans are at last allowed to enjoy the fruit of their labour. I suppose that’s precisely the point of progress but it is hard for me to imagine that the robber-barons might herald this event joyfully—especially if they knowing ushered in their own severance. What do you think? Will those automated cars drive us all off a cliff or make our existence better by abolishing capital?
catagories: ๐ฑ, labour, philosophy, revolution, technology and innovation, transportation
Friday 1 May 2015
rinse cycle
catagories: ⚕️, environment, technology and innovation, transportation
Thursday 9 April 2015
spermaceti
catagories: ๐ณ, ๐, technology and innovation
Sunday 29 March 2015
moral-compass
We are already in possession of a psychological rather than psychic bridge of telepathy in the form of empathy, and รon magazine questions whether computer-aided telepaths might engender more misunderstandings than the resolve, what with the forced intimacy that constantly makes tiny course-corrections to align one’s moral-thinking.
People are already wired to be both vicarious and viral but those influences are well-mediated by our own ideas of self and the limits of expression that lannguage limns. Despite whatever parlour-tricks (and some very helpful and promising applications besides) that science has induced—and not to say that the research in neurobiology is not an important one and that we ought not to be introspective especially for the sake of helping the disabled, but we know very little still about how the mind works and probably could not well cope with being fully integrated into some network to keep our feelings on tack and steady forward. What do you think? Would complete transparency encourage sympathy—or quite the opposite?
catagories: ๐ฅธ, ๐ง , philosophy, technology and innovation
Saturday 28 March 2015
the devil and the deep blue sea or bright lights, big city
catagories: environment, technology and innovation
Wednesday 18 March 2015
bell-hop or pole-position
It struck me as an odd coincidence that I would be addressing the same subject about driverless cars with a co-worker on the way into work this morning—first commiserating how the lanes and the concept of right-of-way kind of get tossed aside when people are in a rush, and then moving on to the feasibility of self-driving automobiles and the question of fault for misjudgment and malfunction.
catagories: ๐ฅธ, technology and innovation, transportation
Monday 16 March 2015
whetstone or rolling-stock
catagories: ♻️, technology and innovation
Saturday 14 March 2015
jam tomorrow and jam yesterday
Indeed, attention is probably the scarcest resource there is—at least by our own estimation, as we absolutely rush, harried through our daily routines, ushered by those gadgets designed to be more fleet of foot and to help us help ourselves—but surely it’s a cultural quirk, a weakness or vanity that can be appealed to like any insecurity.
catagories: ๐ง , labour, lifestyle, networking and blogging, philosophy, technology and innovation
Friday 13 March 2015
livery and latchkey
I wonder if there is a public shame-registry of unmarked white vans. Should we make such a thing? Suspiciously—though probably only in truth relegated to the wilds of my imagination, this one “delivery” vehicle has been parked opposite my apartment’s balcony for almost a week already and I can detect no sign of activity—other than the interior lights were on the other night and one could see the rear windows illuminated through the plastic tinting.
I tried to stare it down last night but nothing came of that standoff. Rather than building a registry, I suppose, snapping a picture probably is more likely to tattle on the observed with hidden, backmasked Q-R codes, camouflaged in the white to off-white of the van’s paint (which is a pretty scary concept, that one’s scanning in invisible data with a digital sweep of one’s surroundings). I guess, however—thinking back to a funny, chance separate incident—there are other ways to have one’s cover blown.
catagories: ๐ฅธ, ๐ง , Hessen, technology and innovation
Tuesday 10 March 2015
dovecote or invasive-species
catagories: ๐ฅธ, environment, technology and innovation
Thursday 26 February 2015
positronic-reinforcement
The New Yorker has a nice, succinct piece on the recent demonstration of the artificial intelligence DeepMind, whose talents draw from two sources, a deductive network of filters and positive-reinforcement.
The program—instructed with only the protocol that winning was good and losing bad—dazzled the human audience with a stellar progression on a platform of classic arcade games with some very masterful and unexpected strokes. It is not that DeepMind is inside the game, like when one challenges the game, but separated like a human player, and quickly devised a sure strategy. The program, however, did not perform quite so well with certain games—like Ms. Pac-Man, and the handlers weren’t quite sure why. Some disparaging voices checked their enthusiasm, as milestones like Deep Blue beating a chess grand-master or Watson winning against Jeopardy! quiz-masters. These achievements, though not coddled and not insignificant, came about, however, through extensive coaching, whereas DeepMind is learning on its own. What do you think? Is growth going to be exponential and get very quickly out of human hands?
catagories: ๐ค, philosophy, technology and innovation