If 5 were 10.....generational cycles in academic life

One of my fave songs of jimi is If six was 9 which I had on vinyl on one of those were 1970s compilations of rock tracks with one band one side, and a different band on the other (usually very good).

However, I'm writing about 5s and 10s.

This year sees the alarming 50th anniversary of my matriculation at Trinity College Cambridge.

It also is the 25th anniversary of being elected as Marconi Professor in The Computer Lab (as it used to be called when I moved here).

LOoking at my academic diary, it looks like it is the 40th anniversary of me teaching undergrads, PhDs and Masters students (begun a few years into working at UCL, where I was between Cambridge and, errr, Cambridge, in what was, at first, the department of computer science and statistics).

It is the 5th anniversary of my playing live and seeing in most open mike and jam sessions at The Artery sessions at the MAP studio Cafe. I suppose it must be about 45 years since we played a session at the Cambridge Folk Festival, and a support gig at Kings College may ball, too. Oh, and Girton Garden Party.

Having an academic career is, of course, full of cycles. The academic year, the degree, promotion processes etc, and of course this leads to generations. I recently met a PhD student who was being advised by someome whose advisor I'd advised - so that's 4 generations. Looking at this (e.g. from the Maths Genealogy Site), it makes sense - stats suggest it is abot 10 years after you finish your own PhD that your own first advisee finishes (n the UK system). Of course, to reach some number of generations, the survival rate (i.e. does a student become an academic (hard), do they get students of their own (quite hard), do those students finish in reasonable time (fairly hard), and rinse, repeat, or recurse, as we prefer)....

I'm still working on figuring out a legitimate Erdos/Bacon/Sabbath number...I've got E (crowcroft :- luby :- noga :- erdos) and S (bit obscure but if you count jamming) but Bacon is a challenge - i was on the same stage as Brian Cox once for a Royal Society AI event at the Royal Festival Hall, so if I can count that, I can inherit his numbers, plus 1.

Gee what fun.

In numbers...:-

60 PhDs supervised

120 PhDs examined

Lost track of masters&undergradute numbers...

237 papers (on orcid)

FRS since 2013. FREng since (space) 1999.

Hot off the press: Cambridge has a retirement policy. This is my last year accordingly. my take.

Conservation Laws

 As we see the Giant Killer Asteroid of AI plummet towards the Home of the Human Race, it becomes clear that the laws of thermodynamics were incomplete.

As well as the conservation of energy, momentum, mass and spin (oh, ok, angular momentum), we must now add the conservation of Intelligence.

This is made obvious by the ease with which obviously stupid AIs are able to fool humans in the imitation game. The AI did not have to be as smart as the person, it only had to meet them half way.

This works both at the indivual level, and at the group level, and at the academic level (people can use an AI to write a terrible paper that human reviewers will accept) and the investor level (venture capitalists fall over each other to fund companies whose products will lead to the ends of the earth).

This is the existential threat to humanity. Not that the AI will wish to eliminate us as competition - it won't need to, because once it gets anywhere near that level, we will all dimmer than a Toc H Lamp

It is already too late to put an end to this.

the internet family's least famous kin

People talk about the "Father of the Internet" or the "Grandfather of the Internet", but no-one mentions the strange uncle of the Internet, or the fairy godmother of the Internet. Nor do they speak (except perhaps on the dark web) of the evil twin of the Internet, or the secret love child of the Internet.

Where are the kissing cousins of the Internet, or the mother-in-law of the Internet? What happened to the wastrel son of the Internet? Indeed, the whole bastard offspring of the Internet have been totally erased from public discourse.

The maiden aunts of the Internet should be given credit, as well as the confirmed bachelor great uncle.

And of course, the Giddy Aunt of the Internet.

fencing the non rivalrous data commons, and the sovereign internet that never really was

Lovely idea, the declarations of independence of cyberspace notwithstanding, the vision of a new politics is not standing up well to the greatfirewalls and random total isolation of states (yes, old fashioned states, as defined by geographic boundaries, including space and maritime, like china, iran, north korea, but now lots of little old places in Europe)....it isn't that hard to find all the ingress/egress points (including satellite updownlinks etc) and plug them after all...

Meanwhile, the data commons that was the World Wide Web is being rivalled to death by hyperscalers, starting way back with google (search and click through) but now with AI.

Economicists love talk about data as non-rivalrous, because of their naive model of zero copy cost of bits, so anyone can "take" a copy, but the source is also left behind so there's no "loss" of value to the source.

Howver, attention (via meta data, provenance, attribution, even accounting/payment)....is very rivalrous - i only have two eyeballs, and one brain and so many hours each day, so it matters which copy I look at.

When the hyperscalers "add value" to the data, they subtract it from the originators. Worse, by trying to multiply the value (by combining), without recompense to the content creators, they undermine the motives of people to contribute any content. So the consequence is the death of Metcalfe's law (the value of the network is the square of the number of nodes -or at least is super-linear in the number of nodes, as any node that is added is both a consumer and a producer so the adding one more node to n, adds n+1 to the net value, not just 1). This means the hyperscalers' long term business plan is doubly dead. Their value cannot actually multiple once they trained on the common crawl - it will increase (at best) sub-linearly. In fact, as it de-motivates people from contributing any new content, the hyperscalers value will fall. We don't want to be data serfs to the AI overlords.

So AI wasn't an existential threat to humans, but it is an existential threat to knowledge.

Computer Science Fiction

 I was randomly thinking about stories that had no actual computing technology dimension, but illustrated a fundamental idea from Computer Science in some accessible way - so here's a few examples to be getting on with...

naming

bootstrapping

indirection

off-by-one-errors 

caching

recursion

encryption

some of my random acts of digital and literary london history

Bits:-

I was recently trawling through some bits of my past and recall that I was taken to program a DEC PDP-8 (in an outbuilding of the Royal Free hospital) in the 1960s by an enlightened maths teacher - we had to learn machine code (actual machine code, because we had to programme the machine on paper tape and so we learned the binary for the instructions....

A bit later in the 1970s i did some work for my cousin at the London hospital on a database he was building for a surgeon there who did knee&hip replacements and wanted to do some stats on how long each prosthetic type lasted...this was programmed in Algol-68 and involved punch cards and use of a remote ICL 2980 computer down the mile end road at Queen Mary College.

Not long after that, I got a real job at North London Polytechnic (up on Holloway Rd) in the math&CS department, where we ran a DEC-10 and I got to do some Fortran and Cobol (as well as Algol-60) but with the glory of a real glass tty (terminal) and screen editor (SOS)....also used to go to their teacher training outfit on Prince-of-Wales road to setup a modem link for people learning a bit about computers there to use the DEC -10 remotely...

Moving to the "modern" era, in 1981 I was writing C Code on a PDP-11 (using the DED screen/picture editor) and cross loading code to a DEC LSI 11/23...at UCL down on Gower St...

Words:-

Through the same 3 decades, my family (based mainly in Parliament Hill Fields, then later in Camden town) had a sequence of literary/political friends, so as a kid I was playing in Stella Gibbons house (with her grandson), or else with Benji Webb on Highgate hill - at some point we had a holiday with ponies and caravans near their grandmother's (the famous Beatrice Webb of the Fabians etc). Then I recall my father asking me if I knew who Ivor Cutler was, as my dad went drinking with him in local pubs in Mornington Crescent. We also knew Beryl Bainbridge (we were at this point living in Arlington Road and she was round the corner in Albert Street surrounded by eccentrics and a large cloud of cigarette smoke.

from cypberspace to necropolis

The Internet was dismantled as a space for humanity, first by the loss of community binding through person-to-person trust and group dynamics - 

blame blockchain/cryptocurrencies, but they are just one symptom of the alienation, that built environments like cities, then suburbs, then oneline social media and the web finally perfected.

As with crypto-currencies, so with AI, but this was foreseen by Mbemebe  in the analysis in the great book on Necropolitics

I was the Son of Sam, I contain multitudes, Now  I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

As with commons, land was enclosed, by Barons, by Kings, by Nation States - to keep people outbut camps and campfirewalls to keep people and ideas in and so with trade agreements, and the flow of information and knowledge, and so with the Interweb.

The Zombie Apocalypse is here and it is AI Voodoo, just as Neuromancer pressaged. And the zombies are the camp police. And we are interned. stoned. maculate, and soon not even dead.

p.s. a little machine learning is a dangerous thing...