Dangerous Idea 120: Ending any list with a prime number. Courtesy of D&D. From The Edge World Question Center: The Edge Annual Question – 2006 WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA? The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true? Pinker apparently offered up the question, and the responses are all over the map and really interesting. Here’s one of note, from Barry Smith: What We Know May Not Change Us … We are perhaps incapable of treating others as mere machines, even if that turns out to be what we are. The self-conceptions we have are firmly in place and sustained in spite of our best findings, and it may be a fact about human beings that it will always be so. We are curious and interested in neuroscientists findings and we wonder at them and about their applications to ourselves, but as the great naturalistic philosopher David Hume knew, nature is too strong in us, and it will not let us give up our cherished and familiar ways of thinking for long. Hume knew that however curious an idea and vision of ourselves we entertained in our study, or in the lab, when we returned to the world to dine, make merry with our friends our most natural beliefs and habits returned and banished our stranger thoughts and doubts. It is likely, as this end of the year, that whatever we have learned and whatever we know about the error of our thinkings and about the fictions we […]

The new mind-body dualism taking shape in the new and largely unconceptualized world of the Internet is, as we have seen, the service/content dichotomy. This dualism reared its head in the discussions on Wikipedia, and it surfaces again in SBC- I mean, AT&T’s- continuing attempts at disrupting internet neutrality. From Ars Technica: AT&T sees benefits to tiered Internet service Saying that “the reality is that business models are changing,” Lindner said that there are opportunities to “enter into commercial arrangements and agreements that are beneficial to [AT&T and other] companies and are certainly beneficial to the service that customers have.” As an example, Lindner talked about gamers who would benefit from AT&T partnering with a game server hosting company in order to provide exceptional service by creating privileged network connections “where we control quality of service.” This isn’t the same thing as allowing users to host game servers, or setting up servers for their broadband community. No, the idea is that using technological means, an ISP can partner with another provider on the Internet, and build a privileged network link to enhance service. The multi-tiered Internet thus begins to take shape. You can continue to pay for your 6Mbps connection, but don’t expect it to deliver all things equally. Quality of Service (QoS), a networking concept describing the technological methods for guaranteeing that some network traffic is serviced better than traffic, is the key. Customers will soon pay for premium service options to see specific kinds of traffic—gaming, VoIP, media streaming, and who knows what else—perform better because there is technology available that can give that kind of traffic a privileged status. For high-intensity bandwidth services, this could mean that companies dealing primarily in Internet-delivered services will need to partner with ISPs in order to deliver the experiences they want. […]

I figured we were due. From Robotics Online: Year of the Robot Just how much intelligence we attribute to a robot is not the issue. They are devices with extremely advanced processing abilities, but human cognition and other emotive abilities aren’t part of today’s robot culture except in science fiction. Not that universities and other researchers aren’t exploring these issues – they are. Some are experimenting with facial expressions and even devices similar to stuffed animals that can help autistic children or provide companionship to lonely seniors, and others are poking into the realm of artificial intelligence where insects are the current measuring stick.

I’m making a list. Checking it twice seemed excessive. Average spending per person for Christmas, 2005: $942 Average spending for internet purchases, 2005: $1,498 Average amount spent by each person in my household: $800 Total amount spent on interfamily gifts: ~$6400 Total number of robotic or artificially intelligent gifts: 10 (Includes 4 remote controlled cars and 5 Aquapets) % of my gifts that required batteries: 0

http://img501.imageshack.us/img501/9726/evolution4009yd.jpg Image Hosted by ImageShack.us From the Detroit News Online: Latest versions of robotic lawnmowers are pretty sharp Once it is programmed, this is a tool that mows your lawn for the entire season requiring no involvement by you. It cuts the grass from 0.8 to 2.7 inches high and has mulching type blades so the finely cut clippings add the equivalent of one application of fertilizer to the lawn over the season. The blade is sharp on both sides, so can be rotated at the end of the season for a second year of sharp cutting. A new blade costs about $10. The Evolution runs on lithium batteries. After working for about four hours, it heads back to its own little house for a recharge which takes about two hours. This shiny red turtle with wheels is so smart, it will go straight to its little house whenever it starts to rain. It is very quiet running and can do hills up a grade up to 27 degrees with no problem. If someone is dumb enough to try to pick it up when it is operating, this little robot turns itself off immediately. If someone wants to steal it, crooks will learn that unless they have the numerical code you used to set it up, the machine is worthless to them. This little robot can handle the mowing needs of up to 30,000 square feet or 3/4 of an acre. You can program the machine to mow every day, or every other day, or if you can believe this, when the grass is tall enough to need mowing. It can actually detect when grass is taller than its programmed height and sets about cutting all the grass that is too tall. $2500 isn’t really jaw-droppingly unreasonable, either.

At Rose’s waffle party this Monday, Kyle asked me about what made Google special. I blathered for a minute about various things, but really, my eye was on the prize, and the prize was Kyle’s well-crafted waffles. But so anyway, here’s a more complete answer. I was trying to say something along these lines, but I am no expert. From CNN: The future of online search (Spark’s John Batelle interview) CNN: Google isn’t the only search business, but its name is synonymous with search. How has it done this? JB: It’s certainly not the only one. There were these companies, apart from Google, that were doing the same thing essentially. But the timing wasn’t right, the technology wasn’t right. The moment Google broke out, there were a number of things that happened. One of them was the bubble actually blew up — pieces were all over the ground. But the public, the audience, us, we didn’t stop using the Internet. People stopped making [it] on the Internet, lot of people lost a lot of money in the stock market, but the rest of us kept using the Internet. The portals, the Yahoos, were not worried about search, they were worried about holding you on their sites. They didn’t want you to find something and go over to it. They want you to stay in one place and watch their ads. It turned out that their ads had very little to do with what you might be interested in. Google’s model, which is how they broke out, was that when you put your intention into that box, it would reorganize the page around your intention. If you put the word “minivan” in there, the page would reorganize the advertisements with regards to minivans. Whether there’s cars or whatever would be right […]

I’m working on the following children’s story. I will update this post as I complete the drawings. https://imageshack.com/ Image Hosted by ImageShack.us W. V. O. Quine is my best friend. Quine’s first names are Willard, Van, and Orman. Quine’s friends call him ‘Van’. https://imageshack.com/ Image Hosted by ImageShack.us Quine was born in Ohio. Quine studied with Whitehead to get his PhD. Whitehead wrote Principia Mathematica with Russell. Quine loves logic. https://imageshack.com/ Image Hosted by ImageShack.us Quine studied with Carnap in the Vienna Circle. Quine and Carnap were good friends. Carnap was a logical positivist. https://imageshack.com/ Image Hosted by ImageShack.us Logical positivism believes in the analytic/synthetic distinction. Analytic statements are true because of their meaning. “All bachelors are unmarried men” is analytically true. Quine doesn’t like the analytic/synthetic distinction. Quine argued against Carnap in Two Dogmas of Empiricism. Quine thinks all our sentences face the tribunal of experience together. People didn’t like Quine for rejecting analyticity. People worried that Quine was rejecting meaning entirely. But Quine was no fool.

I’m sure most of you have encountered this before, but if not, its worth the read. From the late, great Douglas Adams: How to stop worrying and love the internet. Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.

I’ve found the buzzword I’ve been looking for. I’ve also found the people who have been doing research in my area, and they are all in Northern Europe. I wonder if it’s too late to move to Sweeden. The term ‘stigmergy’ was created by Grasse in the late 50’s, from the Greek stigmos meaning ‘pricking’ and ergon, meaning ‘work’. He was studying ant and termite behavior, and ran headlong into the so-called “coordination paradox” The concept of stigmergy provided an alternative theory for understanding the coordination paradox, i.e., the connection between the individual and the societal level: looking at the behaviour of a group of social insects,they seem to be cooperating in an organised, coordinated way, but looking at each individual, they seem to be working as if they were alone and not involved in any collective behaviour. Grasse was looking for “a class of mechanisms that mediate animal-animal interactions”, which was severely lacking from the scientific repertoire. The only tool available were analogies drawn to the functioning of an organism in terms of its individual organ systems, but this had no explanatory value, and in fact suffered from the same coordination issues. The alternative was to merely describe the individual agents with no respect to their interactions. This view was advocated by Rabaud, who was generally skeptical of holistic explanations. The focus on individual behaviour had a tendency of oversimplifying the nature of social phenomena, and Rabaud claimed that the only cause of behaviour lies within an individual, and “if cooperation occurs it is only by chance and as a result of unexpected incidents” (Theraulaz & Bonabeau, p. 99). According to Rabaud each individual was doing its own work, without paying any attention to the work of others, and therefore they had no noticeable influence on each other. Rabaud […]

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us Asimo hasn’t been in the news lately, so I thought we’d check up. Seeing him over summer break at Disneyland was the highlight of my trip back home. He is one of the most integrated and well-developed humanoid robots walking the earth today, and really serves as the most well-known of the celebots. He popped up recently on my AI watch as Honda plans to integrate some of his sensory-motor components into their vehicles. Bloomberg.com: Honda Will Apply Asimo’s Robot Technology to Enhance Car Safety The new Asimo, weighing 54 kilograms, can run at a speed of 6 kilometers an hour, double the speed of its previous version, Honda said. The robot, one of which is on permanent display at Honda’s head office in Tokyo, is used as a receptionist for visiting guests. The robot can walk alongside a guest, hold the guest’s hand, carry a serving tray or push a tea trolley. The robot is equipped with a memory and intelligence system equivalent to a three-year- old child and its strength and physical abilities are equal to a 10-year old, Honda said. Asimo is definitely the torchbearer of robothood, having performed all sorts of diplomatic functions like meeting heads of state and opening the trading day on the NYSE. His integration with vehicle manufacturing is well appreciated here, obviously. On a side note, in looking around for info about Asimo, I stumbled upon the Robocup: The ultimate goal of the RoboCup project is by 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world champion team in soccer. Robocup has already held the first ever humanoid-only soccer game using teams of Robosapiens. Maybe playing chess with Deep Blue isn’t really playing a game with a computer, but I challenge […]

Some rumblings over at The Bellman about the lawsuit brought against Wikipedia. Saftey Neal quoted a News.com article with a bunch of analysts discussing the impossibility of a libel lawsuit against Wikipedia. From CNet News.com: Is Wikipedia safe from libel liability? Thanks to section 230 of the Federal Communications Decency Act (CDA), which became law in 1996, Wikipedia is most likely safe from legal liability for libel, regardless of how long an inaccurate article stays on the site. That’s because it is a service provider as opposed to a publisher such as Salon.com or CNN.com. “I think that there’s no liability, period,” said Jennifer Granick, executive director of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University Law School. “Section 230 gives you immunity for this.” Upon closer inspection of the CDA we find the relevant passages: (2) Civil liability No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of – (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or (B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph The argument, I take it, is that Wikipedia is a service, and doesn’t provide content. In the interest of journalistic integrity, here’s the relevant definition of terms according to the CDA: (2) Interactive computer service The term “interactive computer service” means any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides access to the Internet […]

From Infoworld: Study: Google users wealthier, more Net savvy U.S. residents who prefer Google Inc.’s search engine tend to be richer and have more Internet experience than those who primarily use competing search services from Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc. and America Online Inc., a new study has found. The longer people have been using the Internet, the more likely it is that Google will be their search engine of choice, according to a survey of 1,000 U.S. Internet users conducted by investment banking and research firm S.G. Cowen & Co. LLC. Moreover, people whose primary search engine is Google are more likely to have household incomes above US$60,000 than people who use competing search engines, according to the survey, whose results S.G. Cowen published in a report Monday. Not only is Google an authority, but Google is recognized as an authority by the most competent among us.