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Cory Doctorow gave the best speech hands down at the Singularity Summit a few years ago. But he isn’t really talking about the singularity; its pretty clear he just sees it as a beacon that attracts the similarly technologically inclined, perhaps as a means to form an interest group that takes digital rights seriously. He specifically mentions looking for a word to unite the ‘movement’. As it happens, one of my favorite discussions on this blog was about this very question. Anyone have any new ideas? I think the transhumanist terms of the singularity aren’t very good for what Cory is after; if we are inseparably twined with technology it doesn’t make for a good object of devotion. I have grown less partial to “artifaithful” over time.

Discussing the singularity is often confusing because it makes claims about both technology and artificial intelligence, and its hard to see how the two fit together. In fact, some philosophers have argued that technology is entirely irrelevant to studying the mind using the techniques of artificial intelligence. The idea is that cognitive science is medium independent; it doesn’t matter if you run the program on my laptop or yours or a computer 10 years old, its the same program that can be explained by the same theory. So success in artificial intelligence is theoretically independent of technological advances. I don’t think anyone buys this story any more, but it raises the issue of exactly how the two are related. It is a long story, but this is how I see it: Machines can perform certain tasks better than people. When they do, we often replace the human labor with their machine counterpart. This has been part of the history of technology. Most advances in technology involve machines that can move faster, or stronger, or more durably than people. These machines don’t have to be ‘smart’, although they might be improved by making them smarter. But with the advent of computers, machines started processing information. And the going theory is that the human brain also operates as a kind of information processing machine. That doesn’t mean the human brain is a computer, or that computers are brains. It just means the two are explained by the same basic theory. And in fact, we can get computers to simulate various aspects of the information-processing routines that brains perform. Computer vision is one of the wild successes of this paradigm. The ‘singularity’ supposedly hits when computers are equivalent to the human brain. Why is this event special? Well, what does it mean for […]

Mistrial by iPhone: Juries’ Web Research Upends Trials (NYT) Last week, a juror in a big federal drug trial in Florida admitted to the judge that he had been doing research on the case on the Internet, directly violating the judge’s instructions and centuries of legal rules. But when the judge questioned the rest of the jury, he got an even bigger shock. Eight other jurors had been doing the same thing. The federal judge, William J. Zloch, had no choice but to declare a mistrial, wasting eight weeks of work by federal prosecutors and defense lawyers. “We were stunned,” said the defense lawyer, Peter Raben, who was told by the jury that he was on the verge of winning the case. “It’s the first time modern technology struck us in that fashion, and it hit us right over the head.” It might be called a Google mistrial. The use of BlackBerrys and iPhones by jurors gathering and sending out information about cases is wreaking havoc on trials around the country, upending deliberations and infuriating judges. Jurors are not supposed to seek information outside of the courtroom. They are required to reach a verdict based only on the facts that the judge has decided are admissible, and they are not supposed to see evidence that has been excluded as prejudicial. But now, using their cellphones, they can look up the name of a defendant on the Web, or examine an intersection using Google Maps, violating the legal system’s complex rules of evidence. They can also tell their friends what is happening in the jury room, though they are supposed to keep their opinions and deliberations secret. A juror on a lunch or bathroom break can find out many details about a case. Wikipedia can help explain the technology underlying a […]

Next we solve knowledge. From Wolfram Alpha Computes Answers To Factual Questions. This Is Going To Be Big. There is no risk of Wolfram Alpha becoming too smart, or taking over the world. It’s good at answering factual questions; it’s a computing machine, a tool — not a mind. I predict that this will work rather poorly, but enough to generate interest and to be appealed to a moderate amount of the time. And it will be followed by competitors that do the same thing, only much worse. And then, out of nowhere, using some closely guarded proprietary methods, some tech company will knock this out of the park with the “It just works” feature from day one. And it will be the dawning of a new age.

I had a brief debate on the patio of Jesse’s apartment on Saturday regarding ‘dangers’ of historically blind philosophy. Today, I read the following aside on Peter Smith’s blog : Why should the philosopher be any more especially interested in the history of her subject than the physicist is in the history of hers? If you take a broadly naturalist line, then I think the answer, to a first approximation, is: there is no good reason. The physicist and philosopher alike should start from the hard-won available theoretical options in their best-developed forms. Of course, philosophy is difficult, there’s a danger of foreclosing options too soon, and it is a good to remind ourselves that there may be more theoretical options than the currently most explored ones: the Great Dead Philosophers might provide a useful source we can mine for alternative ideas. So, less approximately, the naturalistic philosopher — being grateful for all the help she can get in her pursuit of truth — might occasionally delve into the history of philosophy for inspiration (and she supposes that she’s more likely to get inspiration from something like the lines of thought actually pursued by her best predecessors than from straw positions created by incompetent exegesis). Still, by my lights, the naturalistic philosopher’s interest in the history of her subject should remain relatively minor and completely instrumental. It perhaps feeds into her thinking about causation or knowledge, or whatever: but it is causation and knowledge that she cares about, and she is interested in Descartes or Hume or Kant only insofar as they offer useful pointers. And as soon as she finds herself at the edge of interpretative swamps — which is in practice rather soon — the naturalistic philosopher will typically lose interest: let the historians amuse themselves, and come […]

From Chaos filter helps robots make sense of the world The Oxford group’s FabMap software tackles those problems by having a robot assign a visual “vocabulary” of up to a thousand individual “words” for each scene, every two seconds. The “words” describe particular objects in a scene, for example a bicycle seat, and the software learns to link words that occur together into groups that are given words of their own. For example, the word “bicycle seat” is almost always found associated with the words “bicycle wheel” and “bicycle chain”, so they linked together in a so-called “bag of words” – “bicycle”. That means when the robot revisits a scene that now lacks, say, a bicycle, it notes a single change rather than the disappearance of many smaller features. That prevents too much significance being attached to the bike’s disappearance and means the robot is more likely to recognise the scene as familiar, says Newman. Video of this bot posted below the break because its shitty ad autoplays.

From Pixar’s Gender Problem WALL-E: Robot somehow acquires human gender characteristics, strives to clean up earth, goes on adventure to space. Why does WALL-E need to be male? Why does EVE need to be female? Couldn’t they both be gender ambiguous and still fall in love? That would have been a bold move, but I think it’s safe to say that Pixar is less than bold on the gender front. “Hey, guys, we have this robot with no inherent gender identity. We want to give it an arbitrary gender. Maybe we could make it female. Yeah, no, that would just just be ridiculous.” Female characters: EVE, Mary, maybe some of the dead ex-captains of the Axiom Challenging Gender Stereotypes score: 2/10. EVE is the competent scientist-bot. Still, making something that is inherently genderless male because male=neutral is bullshit.* … I just returned from seeing WALL-E with my 12-year-old sister, and I’d like to revise my comments on it somewhat. The first time, I just watched for enjoyment, but this time, I tried very hard to identify the cues and actions that marked WALL-E’s and EVE’s genders and see if I could imagine them as gender neutral. In truth, it wasn’t too hard. Up until the scene when they introduce themselves by name, it was pretty easy to imagine each of them as either the opposite gender or gender-neutral. There are only a few things that specifically gender WALL-E as male: his name, a single comment from John (“I know that guy.”), and his copying of the male part of the “Hello Dolly” dances. His voice could be interpreted as masculine, but I forced myself to think “gender neutral” and it actually worked pretty well. With just a few tweaks, particularly the name, I think that WALL-E could have been portrayed […]