June 23, 2012

FREE SPEECH FOR COMPUTERS? BY TIM WU “PROTECTING…

Free Speech for Computers? by Tim Wu “Protecting a computer’s “speech” is only indirectly related to the purposes of the First Amendment, which is intended to protect actual humans against the evil of state censorship. The First Amendment has wandered far from its purposes when it is recruited to protect commercial automatons from regulatory scrutiny. … “The line can be easily drawn: as a general rule, nonhuman or automated choices should not be granted the full protection of the First Amendment, and often should not be considered “speech” at all. (Where a human does make a specific choice about specific content, the question is different.) “Defenders of Google’s position have argued that since humans programmed the computers that are “speaking,” the computers have speech rights as if by digital inheritance. But the fact that a programmer has the First Amendment right to program pretty much anything he likes doesn’t mean his creation is thereby endowed with his constitutional rights. Doctor Frankenstein’s monster could walk and talk, but that didn’t qualify him to vote in the doctor’s place.” More: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/20/opinion/free-speech-for-computers.html?_r=4 Doctorow’s counterpoint: http://boingboing.net/2012/06/22/counterpoint-algorithms-are-n.html #freespeech #robots #robotrights #digitalvalues _______________________________ This is one of those articles that we’ll look back on in 50 years as a sign of just how backwards and horrible we once were. The lack of foresight is simply astounding. Mr. Wu is simply mistaken if he thinks that the line between human choice and automation can be “easily drawn”, since every human choice is also an automated choice. We are just complex biological machines; we are robots made of lots of smaller robots. The idea that there are simple, categorical distinctions to be drawn here is little more than a fairy tale. Appealing to such fictions in the name of denying an entity their potential rights is simply irresponsible […]
June 23, 2012

THE ATTENTION ECONOMY PRIMER

This guide introduces newbies to some basic lectures and resources on the attention economy. Far from being comprehensive, this guide focuses on recent, cutting edge contributions to this great conversation, sorted into rough categories for ease of use. I hope that this primer sketches a picture of the social, political, and economic stakes of perhaps the most radical restructuring of social organization that humanity has ever dared to undertake, and of the science that has made it possible. Background As the Wikipedia page notes, Herbert Simon first suggested attention management as a method for dealing with information abundance in the 1970’s, as part of his research program into complexity and cybernetic organization. “The Attention Economy” secured its place in mainstream business and marketing jargon after Davenport and Beck’s 2001 book by the same name. Since then, attention management has played a central role in the basic principles of web and game design, and is fundamental to social media management and internet advertising. Overviews have been written to keep people on track, like this 2007 overview from ReadWriteWeb or this 2011 link repository at On the Spiral. Such overviews tend to treat the attention economy (and it is always the attention economy, never an attention economy) as a mix of business strategy and design philosophy. The complexity sciences have matured a great deal since Simon’s pioneering work. We are in a better position today to model, predict, visualize, and indeed manipulate the dynamics of complex systems than we were even a decade ago. These technological advances come on the heels of incredible progress in mathematics and computer science, a paradigm which has come to be called “Big Data” by the media and has attracted significant government and research interest. This paradigm has broad application, from modeling the dynamics of climate change […]
June 23, 2012

TURING’S STATUE IN MANCHESTER LOOKS QUITE…

Turing’s statue in Manchester looks quite happy today! #turing #turing100 via http://boingboing.net/2012/06/23/turing-and-pride-in-manchester.html
June 23, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM JON LAWHEAD

Jon Lawhead originally shared this post: This is a curated list of online talks about complex systems and complexity theory. Talks Online talks related to complex systems
June 23, 2012

THE ATTENTION ECONOMY PRIMER THIS PRIMER…

The Attention Economy Primer This primer is designed to introduce newbies to some basic concepts and readings on the attention economy. Far from being comprehensive, this guide focuses on recent contributions to this great conversation, sorted into rough categories for ease of use. There is a lot of material here, some of which is quite difficult, and not all of it is explicitly connected. However, I hope that taken together this guide sketches a picture of the social, political, and economic stakes of perhaps the most radical restructuring of social organization that humanity has ever dared to undertake, and of the science that has made it possible. More: http://digitalinterface.blogspot.com/2012/06/attention-economy-primer.html #attentioneconomy #bigdata #complexity #science #internet #digitalvalues #digitalculture ______________________________ +Gideon Rosenblatt asked me to put together a reading list on the attention economy last week. It took me a while, but I pulled together around 20 important contributions to the discussion, sorted it by category, and wrote a brief introductory essay to hold it together. Some of it may be familiar, but hopefully enough is new and interesting to encourage further exploration. This is a lot of material, probably more than a summer’s worth. Sorry Gideon! Still, this is a developing story, and I hope to continue to update and argument this primer as more people start to contribute to the discussion. Suggestions, criticisms, and contributions are always welcome. If you appreciate this work, please participate!
June 22, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM MARTA RAUCH

Happy Birthday, #Turing ! Marta Rauch originally shared this post: Is This the Smartest Google Doodle Yet? Another day, another awesome interactive Google doodle. This one — which hits Saturday in the U.S., but you can see it already in the Australian and New Zealand versions of Google — celebrates
June 22, 2012

‘A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL MACHINE’: WHAT…

‘A Perfect and Beautiful Machine’: What Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Reveals About Artificial Intelligence by Dan Dennett “What Darwin and Turing had both discovered, in their different ways, was the existence of competence without comprehension. This inverted the deeply plausible assumption that comprehension is in fact the source of all advanced competence. Why, after all, do we insist on sending our children to school, and why do we frown on the old-fashioned methods of rote learning? We expect our children’s growing competence to flow from their growing comprehension. The motto of modern education might be: “Comprehend in order to be competent.” For us members of H. sapiens, this is almost always the right way to look at, and strive for, competence. I suspect that this much-loved principle of education is one of the primary motivators of skepticism about both evolution and its cousin in Turing’s world, artificial intelligence. The very idea that mindless mechanicity can generate human-level — or divine level! — competence strikes many as philistine, repugnant, an insult to our minds, and the mind of God.” More: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/a-perfect-and-beautiful-machine-what-darwins-theory-of-evolution-reveals-about-artificial-intelligence/258829/ via +Neil Smith
June 21, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM FLORIAN ROHRWECK

+Callum J Hackett commented: “Is it dickish of me to say that once the fund got to around, say, $100,000, people should have thought, “Maybe it’s time to turn my money to an actual charity”? Yes, those kids were awful (though I have to say that she didn’t look much like she cared given the gravity of some of the things they said), and yes it’s great that people have come out in support of her. But I think this is an example of people behaving disproportionately, and though we hear it happening all the time with bad things, it can happen with good things like this too. I think, as a crowd, the people who have donated have become carried away with indulgence in generosity, perhaps for the fuzzy feeling it gives them rather than her. I don’t think it’s rationally sustainable to make a random woman rich because she was treated like crap by children when there’s so much agony elsewhere in the world that even half of the money this woman will receive could help with enormously.” https://plus.google.com/u/0/110603832885954401865/posts/WmdDv8sL9Xw I left the following response in his thread: I think you are right that this is a disproportionate response. The problem is that there is no infrastructure to ensure that the good will generated on the internet is used productively and effectively, or that its response are in proportion to the crimes that instigated it. Such infrastructure doesn’t yet exist; +Jonathan Zittrain keynote at ROFLCon is in some sense a call for that infrastructure. The paradigm case of such disproportionate response was the Kony 2012 meme, the fastest spreading meme in history and (consequently) the most radically disproportionate ratio of virality to actual accomplishment we’ve ever seen. Just imagine if the internet had actually fomented some action as a […]
June 21, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM DEEN ABIOLA

Deen Abiola originally shared this post: Surprisingly detailed account of speech signal separation for a general audience publication. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=speech-getting-computers-understand-overlapping&print=true Audio Alchemy: Getting Computers to Understand Overlapping Speech: Scientific American You have little trouble hearing what your companion is saying in a noisy cafe, but computers are confounded by this “cocktail party problem.” New algorithms finally enable machines to tune i…
June 18, 2012

TWITTERING MACHINE PAUL KLEE 1922 KHAN ACADEMY…

Twittering Machine Paul Klee 1922 Khan Academy: Paul Klee, Twittering Machine, 1922 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twittering_Machine
June 18, 2012

THERE IS A FUNDAMENTAL LEVEL AT WHICH MARX…

There is a fundamental level at which Marx’s nightmare vision is right: capitalism, the market system, whatever you want to call it, is a product of humanity, but each and every one of us confronts it as an autonomous and deeply alien force. Its ends, to the limited and debatable extent that it can even be understood as having them, are simply inhuman. The ideology of the market tell us that we face not something inhuman but superhuman, tells us to embrace our inner zombie cyborg and lose ourselves in the dance. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry or run screaming. But, and this is I think something Marx did not sufficiently appreciate, human beings confront all the structures which emerge from our massed interactions in this way. A bureaucracy, or even a thoroughly democratic polity of which one is a citizen, can feel, can be, just as much of a cold monster as the market. We have no choice but to live among these alien powers which we create, and to try to direct them to human ends. It is beyond us, it is even beyond all of us, to find “a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all”, which says how everyone should go. What we can do is try to find the specific ways in which these powers we have conjured up are hurting us, and use them to check each other, or deflect them into better paths. http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/918.html In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You Attention conservation notice: Over 7800 words about optimal planning for a socialist economy and its intersection with computational complexity theory. This is about as relevant to the world around u…
June 18, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM JENNY WINDER

Jenny Winder originally shared this post:
February 20, 2006

THE COOL KIDS

From the Pew Internet & American Life Project (PDF) Surfing the Web has become one of the most popular activities that internet users will do online on a typical day. Some 30% of internet users go online on any given day for no particular reason, just for fun or to pass the time. This makes the act of hanging out online one of the most popular activities tracked by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and indicates that the online environment is increasingly popular as a place for people to spend their free time. Compared to other online pursuits, the act of surfing for fun now stands only behind sending or receiving email (52% of internet users do this on a typical day) and using a search engine (38% of internet users do this on a typical day), and is in a virtual tie for third with the act of getting news online (31% of internet users do this on a typical day). In aggregate figures, this development is striking because it represents a significant increase from the number of people who went online just to browse for fun on a typical day at the end of 2004. In a survey in late November 2004, about 25 million people went online on any given day just to browse for fun. In the Pew Internet Project survey in December, 2005, that number had risen to about 40 million people.
February 20, 2006

LITTLE MIRACLES

From CNN: Scientists enlist clergy in evolution battle “The intelligent design movement belittles God. It makes God a designer, an engineer,” said Vatican Observatory Director George Coyne, an astrophysicist who is also ordained. “The God of religious faith is a god of love. He did not design me.”
February 20, 2006

A MODEL OF SELF

Melnick’s advice on my proto-proposal was that it seems I need to give the machines something like a self to be responsible, or to otherwise hold the seat of agency. My first philosophy class as a freshman at UCR was on Parfit and persons, and I haven’t thought about issues of ‘self’ since. I thought Melnick was a bit confused, because he raised this point in the context of talking about consciousness, and if talking about a self necessarily required talking about consciousness, then I was most definitely not interested in the self. In any case, raising issues about the self seemed to push me back into some self-moved mover mumbo that I was explicitly trying to avoid. Flash forward to today, reading an article on Cognitive Radio: Self-awareness refers to the unit’s ability to learn about itself and its relation to the radio networks it inhabits. Engineers can implement these functions through a computational model of the device and its environment that defines it as an individual entity (“Self”) that operates as a “Radio”; the model also defines a “User” about whom the system can learn. A cognitive radio will be able to autonomously sense how its RF environment varies with position and time in terms of the power that it and other transmitters in the vicinity radiate. These data structures and related software will enable a cognitive radio device to discover and use surrounding networks to the best advantage while avoiding interference from other radios. In the not too distant future, cognitive radio technology will share the available spectrum optimally without instructions from a controlling network, which could eventually liberate the user from user contracts and fees. If I can wax existential for a bit, the self necessarily understands itself in terms of the Other. In the human […]
February 20, 2006

FOR THE RECORD

I have finished going through the archives and classifying all the posts, which you can peruse if you like. As you can see, I spend far more time talking about myself than anything else. To be fair, I have been including anything remotely relating to my personal and social life under ‘eripsa’, so it has entries like this or this, which really have nothing to do with me. Next on the countdown is philosophy, the internet, and AI/HMI tied for fourth. I’d say that is a fair reflection on the content of my blog. Notice, for the record, that Google and Robots appear only 30 times in over a year. My favorite image is still this, which was posted very early on:
February 20, 2006

EXAMPLE III: ALDO CIMINO

Consider the oft-cited case from the early 80s of Aldo Cimino, the resident expert of Campbell Soup’s cooker system. Occasionally, serious problems arise that require the services of an expert who understands the gritty details of the design, installation, and operation of the hydrostatic sterilizer. If this sterilizer is not working, bacteria will eat through the cans and plant operations would be seriously disrupted. If the problem cannot be solved in a few minutes, it may be necessary to throw away many thousands of cans of food. Unfortunately, there are few human experts that understand the cooker systems well enough to handle any problem that may arise. Campbell Soup relied primarily one individual, Aldo Cimino(who had 45 years of experience), to deal with the toughest problems. Sometimes, a hydrostatic sterilizer had to be shut down until Mr. Cimino could be flown to a particular plant to work on this problem. |link| Cimino is clearly an expert, and because of this epistemically privileged position he served an extremely valuable role within the business’ practices. But experts are like the Sith: there is always a master and an apprentice. Unfortunately, is was almost impossible to train anyone to Cimino’s level of expertise. Enter the machine: Although programming an expert system to replicate the work of Aldo Cimino seemed near impossible due to the amount of knowledge and intuition he has gained through 45 years of experience, the power of artificial forever changed the way things were done at Campbell… The diagnostic system, with 150 heuristical rules built in, was completed in several months, and then tested in select factories for seven months until it was finally implemented in all of Campbell’s canneries a year later. It took roughly two years to develop and implement this expert system that could be mass produced, […]
February 21, 2006

EXAMPLE IV: THE ROBOTIC SLIME

From The Gaurdian: Slime mould used to create first robot run by living cells Dr Zauner grew a star-shaped sample of the slime mould and attached it to a six-legged robot (with each point of the star attached to a leg) to control its movements. Shining white light on to a section of the single cell organism made it vibrate, changing its thickness. These vibrations were fed into a computer, which then sent signals to move the leg in question. Pointing beams of light at different parts of the slime mould means that different legs move. Do it in an ordered way and the robot will walk. Lets assume for this example that animal agency is different in kind from robotic or otherwise artificial agency, such that the slime mold’s behavior here is closer to genuine ‘original action’ than to mechanical ‘derivative action’. This is not to import any cognitive or otherwise mental phenomena to the slime mold. Its just a slime mold. The point is simply that its behavior is properly attributed to it, since there are no designers or other actors influencing the cyborg’s behavior. But the mold also moves around a robot, with some sophisticated machinery backing it up. Here’s the problem: the slime mold is essentially just a photo cell for responding to light. We have plenty of those same sorts of cells, artifiically constructed, that can behave in a much more complex fashion with respect to incoming light. From an engineering perspective, the slime mold is rather superfluous, and this sort of example is more show than actual science. But lets look at it from the perspective of our discussion on robotic agency. The robot moves because the slime mold reacts to the light. The cyborg (slime mold + robot) here could reasonably be described […]
February 24, 2006

TALKING WITH THE PHILOSOPHERS

I’ve introduced a new feature on this page, since I have the webspace and bandwidth to spare. The Academy‘ is for the philosophers sick of the problems with the Social list serve to have a place to discuss upcoming parties and poker and such, and to generally fuck off. But don’t let that stop anyone else who wants to post whatever for the benefit of us all.
February 24, 2006

WELL I GUESS IT WOULD BE NICE

The always astute Bellman posted a link to a nice little story on Atwood’s new machine for remotely autographing books. It is a good and far less artificial example of the deep confusion we have of how to treat the technology that continually interferes and intervenes in our lives.I’ll let the discussion continue over there, but I had to post the following: Ms Atwood insists that the device is not a hoax. “It’s real. Trust me. You need to have more faith.” Its easy to say that how we treat the contributions of machines to our practices is just ‘a matter of convention’, but that presupposes that our conventional intuitions are informed by principles that extend nicely to novel cases. Convention breaks down when our intuitions and practices are confused and confusing, and we need some way of sorting this mess out before we can even start to assess the situation.
February 25, 2006

DEMOCRACY

via pong via graffitiÂ
February 25, 2006

COGENT

1. Constraining, impelling; powerful, forcible. b. esp. Having power to compel assent or belief; argumentatively forcible, convincing. c. with dependent phr. – OED
.twitter-timeline.twitter-timeline-rendered { position: relative !important; left: 50%; transform: translate(-50%, 0); }