The wrong Fears of the wrong AI.

The unfortunate revisionist appropriation of the AI name for Machine Learning has also led us down the garden path after a red herring in a total wild goose chase for accountability of algorithms. While that is an entirely reasonable thing to do, it always was back when algorithms were just human bean counters with clip boards (I am sure you could find people like that controlling the tasks for slaves constructing the Ziggurat of Ur (c.f. the me of Enki  in Stephenson's novel, Snow Crash).

These algorithms can be deployed with a lack of transparency or explicability, and in ways that offer no agency to people subject to their outputs, and so on, as discussed in many places in recent years (or just "computer says no").

But real AIs will be extremely weird, and the clue is in the A bit. We recognise intelligence and we have started to see it more widely than previously - the smart tool-making crow, the chimps that play tricks on each other that clearly demonstrate a theory of mind, curious cats, the possibility that dolphin's language supports teaching of abstract concepts (left/right, counting, colour etc), this is all natural, evolved, and embodied intelligence.

Why would an artifice that had complex, adaptive, and possibly social ways to perceive and manipulate the world around it be anything like things we recognise above (tool, making, humour, language, curiosity)? Can't we use our so-called intelligence (and creativity) to imagine some AIs that are really radically different? Where might we find such ideas? I'm thinking, perhaps, in mythology - however, a lot of gods are only human - indeed, tales from Asgard, from Mount Olympus, from the Vedic era, smack of soap operas.

Perhaps from more pointless activities (what is Art for, after all)? or from the emergent murmuration properties of innumerable spelling bees? Perhaps the closest to what I'm talking about are the eccentrics (Ships) in Iain Banks' Culture novels...

And its most likely that a real AI would not represent any existential threat to humans, as we are doing a good enough job of that ourselves without any help from smart machines. The only hope would be that AI humour would rest in some jape like saving the human race from itself, just for the lolz.

The Chinese Remaindered Book Club - the CRBC

In this club, members can only borrow a book for 5 minutes and must then pass it along.
After reading a month's worth of books, members come together and try to reconstruct the
books they have read from these snippets.

The books are all acquired for free from the remaindered books lists of low-ranking publishers.

Incredibly, the reviews written by the CRBC are amongst the most highly sought examples of literary criticism in the history of the world,. offering deep insight into plot, character, authorial quirks, the influences and cultural norms and divergences of the life and times in which the book was written and set.

Except that none of the books described can be found anywhere in any library or book shop, nor are the publishers to be discovered at their addresses. The ISBNs appear to have never been issued, and serious investigations at the Library of Congress and Bodlean have come to nothing.

Membership of the CRBC is by invitation only, and the names of the current active participants is a closely guarded  secret.

Attempts to ghost write the books based purely on the reviews have led to despair and ridicule.

evidence-resistent policy - four thoughts

I read the Professor R.D.French's provocative article on four schools of thought on evidence-based policy, which did not seem to be terribly optimistic about our chances as scientists to influence policy makers (and at some level, may even have cast doubt on whether we should try).

It prompted me to think these even more negative thoughts about policy making itself, which might suggest that people that accumulate evidence, and wish to have an effect ("impact"), may just do better to look elsewhere - as with French's article, I group these four thoughts under for R's

Redundant - perhaps the tension between consideration of politics (popularity/fear etc) and evidence is such that it cancels out, and policy is made that essentially has no effect - an example of this was when presented with evidence of how to improve road journey travel, a policy maker said "oh no, if we do that that way, we'll be accused of spending too much money, and if it doesn't work we'll be accused of wasting money" so policy was to do it a way that cost little and did nothing.

Reactive - a lot of policy may just be a response to de facto behaviour - examples here might include some countries legalising of THC, where the alternative was to continue with the ludicrous position that half of the population were criminals. here policy makers are responsive followers, rather than leaders (which may also be the case above too).

Resignation - a decision has been made and can't be changed, despite al the evidence, even evidence that the population doesn't like the decision any more (think "invade Iraq" or "leave Europe" or Thatcher ignoring civil servant advice on the poll tax - flying in the face of policy because one is resigned to the decision is a suitable path to resignation in the other sense of the word:-)

Reality - some writing on EBP says that scientists should not be so arrogant. However, nuclear war, climate change, anti-biotic resistant bugs - these are very different matters from austerity and keynsian economics or fake news and brexit - to get these in proportion, they're potentially total extinction events. of course, there may be some of the same schmoozing and influence necessary to get some significant change of direction, but in my view we need something more fundamental like a shift away from capitalism (I didn't say socialism), since there's no evidence there are any ways to connect with longer time scales in the current scheme of things. And evidence suggests we must, and policy makers show little sign of understanding that these are game changers.



p.s. after discussion with Ian, lets note that natural & life sciences have probably had more success influencing policy, and perhaps the resistence is highest for input from social & economic sciences, where the evidence may more in dispute, or even the entire methodology or disciple in some doubt (recent results on lack of reproducibility in psychology, or lack of predictive value in macro-economics appear to lend credence to the policy makers' distrust of academic advice, for example, in those realms).

an alphabet of data

who ate my data
who bartered my data
who curated my data
who deleted my data
who exfiltrated my data
who faked my data
who googled data
who hoarded my data
who imitated my data
who japed my data
who kyboshed my data
who lambasted my data
who mumbled my data
who nimbied my data
who ogled my data
who perfumed my data
who quarantined my data
who rationed my data
who stole my data
who traded my data
who undeleted my data
who valued my data
who whistleblew my data
who xeroxed my data
who zeroed my data

brief review of proof copy of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

I was sent an unbounded proof copy of this book by an editor at the publisher, so what you get in a bookshop may not be quite the same.

tl;dr This is like Jaron Lanier with teeth.
i.e. if you read You are not a gadget, and then the polemic,
"Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now", or you want to go back in time, have read Jerry Mander's "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television", you have a head start.

However, you also have to have read Hannah Arendt's revision/update work on the cycle of 0wnership by capitalism, and much much more. The chapters are also all prefaced with fine quotes from Auden (except a couple of outliers with Leonard Cohen and Hildebrand) from sonnets from China.

The take home (perhaps) is the coup from above, where surveillance capitalism is (perhaps) distinguished from any other capitalism by 3 extraordinary properties:

1. a position of extreme privelege (why do those old rules apply to our shiny bright new stuff?)
2. massive asymmetry of agency, and necessarily also of legibility and status in any negotiation.
3. disregard for democracy in the deepest sense (there is no demos)

The book is largely descriptive, but has a mass of detail, reminding me of a (more readable) digital world version of Piketty's Capital in the 21st century, although he also had some modest proposals for remedy/redress, which are still possibly not out of reach, whereas this work seems somewhat more pessimistic, although I need to read it again and see if the seeds of surveillance capitalism's destruction are contained within.

emergent morality

There's old work from Kropotkin from observing animal behaviour and seeing both coopeation, and sacrifice repeated exposure that suggested (without invoking any magic/superstition) that, while the gene may be selfish, that isn't all there is to society.

A simple one-shot game theoretic approach doesn't deal with this, so people moved on to iterated games, and most famously (at least from my reading) showed that the prisoner's dilemma is not a dilemma at all when you consider multiple iterations (repeat offenders learn to "trust" one another).

At a fancy level, this is sometimes ascribed to a theory of mind, where "you think that I think that you think that I think...so lets call the whole thing off" - actually, this is a short cut - you don't need a theory of mind to explain cooperative strategies in dumb animals-  you just need a population carrying out the iterative procedure - the cooperative strategy has higher survival value over the multiple encounters and multiple individuals. What "empathy" does, is simply allow planning, so you don't have to go through all these iterations to learn the better soluton - you just imagine them. So instead of being dead like both Iago and Othello, or Macbeth and his wife, you choose life.

There are exceptions - the lone indvidual making a single encounter is incented to renege on this. In social terms, this is why villages distrusted travellers - they know that the traveller is going to try and game their trust and not have to put up with any tit-for-tat strategy, as they will be long gone before the second screen. I'm wondering if this also explinas why people get more "conservative" as they get older - they have less to lose as they approach death in terms of retaliation or exclusion.

So this is explored quantitatively in some interesting real world scenarios in this paper on what I'm calling  emergent morality

Now just how does this get adopted (or rejected) as a social norm/ethic? Well, we need to run the population dynamics together with some model of encounters - how many people are a) only going to meet a group just once or b) going to exit the game (i.e. die) real soon?

This would then give us a (stable?) distribution of cooperative versus selfish behaviour. Note here when I say "selfish", I mean rational selfish in a short term way - the cooperative players are also rational selfish, but in a longer term sense (they iteratate, whether really or imaginatively)

We can then extend this to include a small number of mutants (bad apples) that engage in Byzantine behaviour (Loki, disrupters etc). And then we could use this to design mechanisms for society that lead to fair collective outcomes (aka maximise social welfare) despite some fraction of selfish, and some (usually small) fraction of byzantine players. Such algorithms exist (see the literature on BAR Fault Tolerance for Cooperative Services ) but assumes that you "just" use the altruistic players to improve performance of the system designed for selfish/rational and byzantine/bad nodes) -

I'm thinking more, how do you build such algorithms for systems like Wikipedia, or social media content moderation, or even liquid, full online democracy?

26 connections to everywhere

why do "clients" connect to servers? given we know
1/ everyone, pretty much, is connected to amazon, facebook, google, twitter,  youtube etc,
and
2/ the IPv4 address space is full up
why not just have the cloud call every address?

we know  there will never be more than 26 services in the world, (because currently, you need autocomplete asap in the browser on any url you type, and most people sadly use english, which means most web sites are shackled to the roman alphabet - hint to any startup there you won't make it if you can't find a spare first letter:)

so then we could just have a well known port for each of these 26 services, and punch a hole in the NATs in the world for those well known ports (or if paranoid, restrict it to source IP prefixes in the owned space of amazon, facebook, google, twitter, youtube etc)

resistance is futile, impedance is high, time for a volte-face?

truth drains away

You know about making sure you've turned off all the taps in your home when you go away? water, gas, and even electricity (some devices may be on standby, but can wakeup and catch fire - of course, if you were clever-lucky, you'd have a flood from a leaky faucet at the same time which would put out the fire. but if you were dumb-sad, the fire would ignite the gas leak and blow up your lovely home).

For the same reason, we should go around making sure all the digital devices (TV, Voice assistant, Smart Toiler, laptop, tablet, phone, watch, fitness widgets) are all turned off, whenever they are not in use.

The reason is that these devices contain truths. However, in today's Internet, truths drain away.
Gradually, truth leaks out of the device, leaving behind only fake news and advertisements  for things you don't want (all the more so, because you aren't there then anyhow).

The rise of falsehoods on the Internet is our own fault - it is because we are careless with our personal truth - all our 1s are turned into one great big zero. or worse, the sign bit is set and negativity overwealms us all. The value of the leaky Internet is minus the square of the number of leaky users.
for 2 leaky users, the net worth is -4, for 1000 users, its -1000000. if half the users stopped being leaky, the net would be worth nothing. if just two thirds of the billions of users were to stop being leaky, the net would be actually quite useful once more.

its just plumb good sense.

data is the new tobacco

google famously said "don't be evil". i've now repeatedly heard people from national intelligence agencies say, in public, "everything we do is lawful". one analytics company said that they make ethical decisions on who they won't work for but provide s/w for the above.

just who are they kidding, apart from themselves?

as i mentioned previously, someone at a recent event on ethics and privacy enhancing etchnologies said (under chatham house rule, so i can't attribute it)
"Data is the new fur", and at another meeting (same constraint)
"I can't see why mum's are proud of their kids going to work for Alpabet Soup, they wouldn't be like that if it was a tobacco company".

Either of these would do to get some sort of re-adjustment of the public enhagement such as this report from the RSA with all the above...

fur or baccy, choose your poison...

at one of the events, we ended up with one of the organisers saying "the problem here is capitalism. and patriarchy...."

oops

digital person(ae)

regarding decentralised, fair analytics?
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-digital-person-a-symposium-tickets-43050737916

some possible discussion/questions

1. who can proxy for a hub in the home, for great grandfather...the bank, the kids, the bbc, the GP, all of the above...(see 4)...

2. price discrimination v. differentiation - do we need "cloud neutrality"

3. how near to privacy/security/utility tradeoff curve are we in practice in central v. decentralised cloud/analytics?

4. what about identity systems? are we ready for multiple pseudonyms each with a subset of our attributes (am-over-18, or am-a-citizen of country x) instead of centralised id with everything?

5. who will power the infrastructure when its completely decentralised?

we're a long way from microgeneration...

6. in edge ai, what are the distributed analytics _coordination_ challenges

7. in edge ai, what are the distributed analytics _privacy_ (diff?) challenges

8. how do we get assurance (sousveillance/someone-elses-pov dashboard) in the decentralised world?

edge to edge bogus arguments in systems design

since the arrival of blockchain tech, we're seeing a lot of bandwagonning on
edge-computing.

what most the pundits pushing for this is "just-inside-the-edge" computer/storage/services -

i.e. its still owned by network providers or co-lo kit from a good-old-fashioned-cloud service - same-old same-old. it is getting lower latency/higher availability, less backhaul network costs and (possibly) able to localize service behaviour to geographic jurisdiction, which are all ok things to do.

but it isn't p2p.

but it isn't end-to-end.

e2e was/is the liberating architectural feature of the net that lets anyone run a service. that lets value scale super-linearly (between n*ln(n) and n^2 depending who you believe).

p2p was a failed tech predicating on everyone running things e2e in their home, pocket/car. it failed because of three barriers
i) asymmetric capacity in access networks - this is hard to blame on anyone - its a feature of using old copper capacity and how shared medium spectrum works for fixed and wireless broadband. slowly, it is becomine less the case (last time i looked, 10M out of 35M households in the UK had fiber, which doesn't have these constraints.
ii) IPv4 address space depletion leading to being NATted to death, rather than deploying IPv6 (or anything else).
iii) software deficiencies leading to patriarchical firewalling of systems with vulnerabilities, rather than fixing the root cause (poor systems security).
iv) add yours here....

if you don't run the ledger, file service, social network, messenger platform in your home/pcket/car, it isn't end2end. if it isn't p2p, it isn't e2e. if it isn't e2e, its still 0wned by someone else. even if you have a spare set of keys.

Quantum Computing and Quants and the Turing Institute's mission

so people are afraid of quantum computing.
people should be far more afraid of today's algorithmic trading systems.
the world is run by a bunch of computer programs which have never been scrutinized - they might just each be nonsense, but in combination, even if they are all very correct, they certainly create nonsense. The fiction that the world is running on some financial fantasy academic structure known as a market is a wonder to behold - essentially, the sustained collective delusion in the face of obvious massive fractural objections (american exceptionalism:  why is the dollar worth what it is, aside from military might? protected markets inside China; split level economies like Brazil and so on) - all this is like the medieval world where the SMith would charge one price to shoe the farmer's horse, and another (massively higher) price to shoe the Lord of the Manor's horse - why? and why didn't anyone run arbitrage on this? because society and people don't mix with the idea of money really at all well.

So a lot of work in machine learning and AI and finance purports to address problems like money laundering and fraud and so forth. And yet we live in a world where the whole operation of existing algorithms is based on a false belief, that they operate in a market. Many of them operate in the casino that is the stock market, which is even more divorced from reality than the rest of the economy. Here algorithms are in an arms race, and yet it is an odd arms race, as unlike warfare i nconventional battlefields where we can pick apart the guns and planes of the other side from time to time and take their ideas, or at least reverse engineer them, the algorithmic race in the stock market is too complex and too fast to allow this - code just interacts via the symptomatic (observed) behaviour of the system, and rarely if ever directly interacts with other code. Most weird.

SO the real first duty of ML&AI in the world of finance should be to expose and fix these structural problems - first, to model the worlds economy properly (e.g at least as well as people like Piketty, but more so, dynamically), and to build a sound system for running investments without casinos like the stock market, but also without fantasies like Adam Smith's invisible hand.

So what has this to do with Quantum Computers[1]?

Well, QC promises to run some new algorithms in a new way - there aren't any signs of a full working QC piece of hardware yet, and there are precious few actual algorithms[2] so far, but one in particular has grabbed a lot of attention, which is the possibility to factorize numbers super fast compared with good old fashioned von-Neumann computers (faster even parallel and distributed vN machines) - this is due to the qualitatively different way that QC hardware works (highly parallel exploration of state spaces, scaling exponentially with the number of Qbits).

So what does this threaten?

Well, it threatens to break cryptograpy, which means our privacy technologies for storing and transmitting (and possibly even securely processing[3]) data are at risk. Bad guys (or just curious people) will be able to see our secrets.

So two thoughts
A) why can't we just devise new QC encryption algorithms, which just moves the arms race along in the usual way (a million bit keys for example, or something really new we havnt thought of yet)? Then we are back to the same old normal world where most data breaches will be because of social engineering or stupidity and self inflicted (minister leaves unencrypted USB stick on the bus) wounds.
B) Maybe we get more cautious as a whole and just don't send stuff around so glibly or provide remote access to our computers so readily. Maybe access control and authentication and just implementing least privlege properly could work most of the time, and the whole idea of crypto saving us was a chimera and a delusion, just like the whole idea of the market was a snare and a delusion?

my 2 q-cents.

j.
1. not to be confused with quantum communication where we use entanglement just to detect eavesdroppers - a perfectly sound, existing tech with a very narrow (point to point, not end-to-end) domain of usefulness.
2. shor's algo for example. one puzzling thing is that we had hundreds of algorithms for von-neumann style computers before we had any working hardware. why is it so hard to conceive of algorithms for QC? seems like it is a poor match for how humans are able to express methods for solving problems (which are many, and varied, but don't seem to fit ensemble/state space exploration, except perhaps in MCMC:-)
3. eg.. homomorphic crypto - possibly also at risk from QC, although re-applying ideas like garbled circuits to a QC machine shouldn't be too hard:-)

How science progresses - falsifiable, probably or paradigm shift, likely?

Reading Staley's excellent introduction to the philosophy of science was reminded of reading Popper's Objective knowledge back in the 1970s, but now I'm a recovering Bayesian, and am immersed in social science explanations like the structure of scientific revolutions by Kuhn, or even the whole idea of funding/groupthink/paradigms, I'm now convinced we don't have a good basis for choosing the right description of the process (or classifying best practice) until we study the past, both its pre- and post- states - i'm thinking that people choose to run occam/popper after they intuit a new paradigm shift (e.g. copernican model of planets) and use some confidence models to decide that, when the new theory has objectors, the objectors are outliers, whereas the old new outliers the new theory explains were more important than the new old outliers - of course, the new theory can still be wrong, but the smart money is that it isn't...

what if you were the only real person in the world

Anyone read Theodore Sturgeon's fabulous short story It Wasn't Syzygy?

Trying to wean people off facebook by creating an alternative (e.g. advert free, subscription, but open to link to other platforms) system, so everyone always starts by saying "you can't beat the network effect". so at what scale does this network effect magically become unbeatable? for example, the web has beaten TV even though TV had a billion users. Metcalfe claimed the value was n-squared, others have toned that down tho n log(n), but i think it's ignoring the _negative_ contribution level from spam/phish/troll/advert/attention grabbing, which inevitably grows with the network, but usually, over time, faster in the end. so here's my proposal anyhow: we invite you to our new net which has "everyone" in your network on it, but initially, your friends are al just bots emulating your real friends they make you feel at home there. now you tell your real friends about your safe new, ad free social net, and as they join, they replace the avatar/bot of them (a bit like the opposite of the stepford wives). oh, did I forget to tell you. we already did it. No, really, We didn't have to do it, they are doing it to themselves - c.f. Dr Wu's fine book on the attention merchants...

+
 so in fact we can model this from the fact that the network is directional, and end points (humans) take more time to create new content than to consume (new to them) content - so even if we aren't all couch potatoes, this asymmetry in creativity versus consumption means that the network will tip from peer-to-peer, to being dominated by a small number of producers and a large number of consumers - the cost of creation will drive the quality of creation down, but the quantity up (to keep it new - well known to pornographers for example - c.f. https://yourbrainonporn.com/)

declining big data, colour me rimbaud

first you beg for data
then you bag the data
then you de-bug the data
then you get bog-ged down in the data
finally, you big up the data

so what's new in this , i beseech you from the depth of my vowels?

appear to peer - ideas for glastonbury from 2017

so standing in the middle of a very large field surreounded by 200,000 people, but within about 100 peoples' handshakes of a bar, why not build a massive p2p version of uber for beer? you register and then people literally pass beer across to you and you pass money back.....you'd need a trust/reputation system - there'd be some spillage....but that's true anyway (I got wrong change at least 3 times at the bar the traditional way)

the world's first firechat-style beer-to-beer network.....


could also work for snack deliveries...and recycling

meanwhile, in the traditional Real Life, observing someone walk from the Village Pub to the center of the crowd in front of the Pyramid (watching The National, if you want to know) carrying 2 pints + 2 plates of fine ethnic stacked high food, narrowly avoiding many scurrying people, we are a Very Long Way Away Indeed from self driving AI robots navigating a space this complex & dynamic.

if you care  about music, what was good? most stuff, like Thundercat, Joseph, the Lemon Twigs, and some oldies like Barry Gibb and Chic, and a blistering opening set from the Pretenders, with la Hynde in excellent voice. Radiohead? Nah, a bit meh, really. Kris Kristofferson (81) charming, but frail. The aforesaid National? Very Good Indeed. Beyond all possible descriptions? Father John Misty and London Grammar - both of them made time. stand. still.  loads of good comedy, politics, amusing high wire acts & lessons. and a very very chill mood (helped by fairly fine weather almost the entire time!)

unfairness in automated decision making in society.

reading this book about mis-use of maths/stats recently, i think we can go further in condemning the inappropriate approach taken in some justice systems to decide whether a guilty person receives a custodial sentence or not.

The purpose of locking someone up (and other stronger sentences) is complex - it can be to act as a disincentive to others; it can be to protect the public from that person re-offending; it could be a form of societal revenge; and it might (rarely) be an opportunity to re-habilitate the offender.

So we have a Bayesian belief system in action, and we have a feedback loop.  But we better be really careful about i) the sample of inputs to the system and ii) the sample of outputs....and not forget these are humans, and capable of relatively complex and highly adaptive behaviours.

So what could be wrong with the input? (sigh, where to start) -
people who commit crimes are drawn from a subset of society, but people who are caught are drawn from a biased subset - firstly, they're probably less well educated, or dumber, or both, because they get caught. secondly, they're probably from a socially disadvantaged group (racial minority).
people who are found guilty are also the subject of selection bias (and people who get away with it, are party to survivor bias too) - juries have re-enforced the bias in the chance they are caught.

people who are sentenced acquire new criminal skills - this may make them less likely to get caught if they are just poor, but more likely if they are dumb.

So in there' I count at least 4 ways that a decision system that looked at re-offending rates, and properties of the person found guilty, would be building in positive feedback that will lead to more and more people being incarcerated, with less and less justification.

occasionally, external changes (accidental natural experiments) perturb the system and make this more obvious - in the film documentary, the House I live in , the absurd war on drugs is shown to be massively counter-effective - near the end, the huge bias that this has set against african americans starts to wane, simply because of the move in the poor white working class of america into making and consumption of crystal meth (so brilliantly portrayed in Breaking Bad - suddenly, the odds stacked against on group, multiplied by re-enforced prejudice 3 or 4 times over (indeed, one more time for the 3 strikes rule), hit lots of "trailer trash"....

An interesting research task would be to run a model inference tool on the data and see how many latent causes of bias we can find - maybe my 3,4 or 5 is not enough.

truly the world is broken, when it comes to evidence based decision making!

of the internet, for the internet, by the internet

what have we wrought?

i don't think it is about the echo chamber, bubble, or
faddish claims about fake news and alternative facts.

nor do i accept that  the internet offers a zero-cost channel - the internet switched the value-propositions around by reducing cost for sender, but for some kind of content, it simply moves the cost somewhere else

1/  to the receiver (spam/advert/recommend, whatever you call them) -
2/ to the content creator (for music, film.games etc)
3/ to regulator (to ensure neutrality, control monopolistic tendencies etc)
4/ to the service provider as real competition drives profits to truly marginal
5/ somewhere we havn't thought of yet

so what we didn't think about was how to design robust games to allow people to design and choose appropriate system architectures for sustainable worlds, whether journalism (that doesn't let the vocal extreme minority control the agenda) or creative industries (so original work is rewarded), or peer-economic structures like uber, airbnb, etc that treat the means of production/labour force fairly...

hard times

[yes, i know this is sort of a version of jaron lanier's stuff, but it is becoming more and more evident that the complaint is right, but we need an actual fix, and that that is the hard problem, not identifying the cause, but designing the solution]

Five Digital Epistemological Objects for 2064

Five Digital Epistemological Objects for 2064
or
A Digital Narrative Ark of the Knower

jon crowcroft, Cambridge, 8.5.2014


dreams, visions and prophecies in bits

It is too hard for humans to fully comprehend humans, but it may be possible
to construct a digital model, a computer simulation or even emulation,
that is accurate, not just descriptive, but also predictive. Such a
model would embody modes of thinking that are not entirely rational,
which is what current "AIs" attempt, but would extend to domains
which, I believe, are entirely human, such as dreaming and visionary
or prophetic processes - these are not magic, or pseudo-science ideas,
but ways in which human thought processes leapfrog piecewise or
incremental steps, perhaps building on such mundane stages, but only
revealing themselves thus-wise, as revelations. Not blue gene beating
humans at chess, but more surprising.


computational ethics

We struggle with ethical dilemmas. Why? there are ambiguities or
paradoxes. These are quite easy to express in the right formal
systems, so we should be able to create, perhaps with help from
machines, ethical props, crutches, to help guide us to what is right.
Asimov laws of robotics (4 in the end) were naive, but a start - we
should play with more such. The history of robots (golems, rossum's
universal, mary shelley's etc) is littered with great examples.


diseases who think

it is a high pomp of pretentiousness that only humans think. we know
(e.g. from Dunbar's (and Alison Richards') studies of apes)
that the theory of mind is present to some degree in other creatures,
and sometime, less so in some people.
But the most alien of creatures, such as hive animals, and,
in extremis, bacteria are capable of collective reasoning. Can we
train them to help us? Can we
infect people with thoughts, literally, rather than merely
figuratively?

Bring meaning to Pat Cadigan's notion  of being incurably informed
(see Synners).


haunts - memories stronger than reality

smells, and superstitions, influence us and resonate more than careful
abstract recollections. Perhaps there's an embodiment of knowledge in
these modalities that we could build better, artificially, than
already exist. Can we code ghosts?

learning to un-banish ghosts might be the ultimate rationalisation.

embodiment of knowing in the knower, is in some cases physiological
(scent, muscle memory, belief) - capturing this missing element (where our
typical current digital media representations address typically only 2
or 3 (sight, hearing, perhaps touch) of the more boring senses, seems
like a worthy goal in terms of understanding our understanding more
deeply.


frailty -

we need digital analogues for flakiness  - just as digital
transmission of moving pictures can "degrade gracefully", perhaps
knowledge can be coded in ways that can still be usefull when partly
rotten - as with the human suffering from dementia, still able to carry
out some cognitive tasks, perhaps artificial thinking can be made
resilient. [today's programs, if even slightly corrupt, simply work
then fail - this is a poor show].

In a deeper sense, reflection on the inherent inaccuracy of representation
is needed, etc

indeed, the optical metaphor can be (over-)extended, using the notion
of different lenses, not just for different viewpoints (different
epistemic architectures) but also for level-of-detail - zooming in to
some (reductionist) model, or retreating to some level of abstraction.
Technology (that is processable - i.e. usually digital) can help with
this - indeed, statistics, visualisation, modeling in general, or
towers of models, are all about this.

losing detail is not necessarily loss of knowledge - indeed, the
ability to ignore detail (see the wood for the trees, or the aforesaid
abstraction process) is one of the more useful human (cognitive?)
skills.


--------> Notes and Websites

The mantra data -> information -> knowledge -> wisdom
(c.f. tofler and brunner's future shock/shockwave rider)
is glib, but useful. each stage in this notional process adds
some sort of structure and processing, whose algorithms and
representational choices are themselves just more data (as per the
Eckert/Von Neumann Stored Programme Computer Architecture - sometimes
incorrectly ascribed to Alan Turing:)

Provocations from the meeting of 7.5.14 at CRASSH:

Q.what diff does move from analog to digital make w.r.t knowledge?
[not restricted to humanities part of digital (humanities)

-ve A
n.a. no change
n.b. networking/
n.c. distributed knowledge

n.d. just scale/efficiency...
[me, but emergence - see below and

http://rappers.mdaniels.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/
http://www.theliteraryplatform.com/
http://fufufo.com/

two types of DH
1. boring: use of computational tools to do studies like word count in jane austin
2. more interesting - humanities study of social/digital/new media

what about both? e.g. study of sampling/mash up?
or
http://www.digitalgovernmentreview.org.uk

+ve A - changes knowledge & also modes&modalities of knowing...

so not H applied to D, but D  to H
so how do humans change when they go digital...

e.g. measure of time - exact? v. inexact
so exactitude is itself a new suitable topic....

---->
every decoding is an encoding...maurice zapp, in lodge's small world:)

e.g.  science - robot scientists discovery/sharing:)
eScience program (e.g. climateprediction.com, seti@home etc)

better e.g. Maths:
proof assistants
Coq & Isabel
e.g. 4 color map & Fermat's last theorem)

Lessig: code as law

2. quantitative: cost copy -> zero (recall)
[all email since 1976]

Piketty's Capital in 21st Century - 20 countries for 150 years...
Scale sometimes is a qualitative change - emergence

3. qualitative: artefacts...

Bad - ideas (e.g. big data) broken (lose nuance)
good - new forms (susan collins @ slade - many turner prizes...


---->
Discussion:-

+ culture
+ society

Piketty: capital in 21st century - twaddle v. girlfriends...

narrative v. sci method -
just different points in process in science v. humanity work...?

versus! creative step in science is still not understood:)

The mistakes are ... interesting..-slade art...
the two brians (may&cox:)

read also: more than human (theodore sturgeon) and
shockwave rider (john brunner)

see also post modern object truth & no value judgements ?:-)
liberal  arts students in 70s who went into west coast startups
may have become unethical coz of this:)

diy:and failure machines:
http://www.katjungnickel.com/2014/02/28/dagstuhls-diy-networking-seminar-making-a-failure-machine/

cats will 0wn the Internet of Things just like the rest of the Internet

we have a smart cat flap - from a jolly good company called sureflap. we've had it a few years. Our cat is chipped so if she gets lost she can be returned and so the vet can tell what treatments she's had etc etc - all good...

we live in a crowded cat neighbourhood, so many cats try and come into our house to eat our cats food and generally invade her space etc

so we got this cat flap as it reads pet chips, and can be programmed for a given one (actually, a bit like your WiFi AP, for which see more later, it can store up to 30 cats RF-IDs - jolly good, so far).

So then the cat flap goes wrong (starts running batteries flat every day-  normally they last nearly a year....so we go on the company website, and they have a neat diagnostic tool, and we run through it and they say it needs replacing (the smart flap, not the cat:-), and we enter the serial number (of the flap, not the cat) and they say "yes, that is still under warranty and they are sending us a new replacement (very smooth service indeed- arrives next day!).

so we install replacement asap as I am getting fed up with old one using up so many batteries, but I am in a hurry to get to work, so I put the cat flap in the default learning mode, which is that it flashes its little light once a second until the first cat goes through, at which point it stops learning and only lets that particular cat-id in/out.

so i get to work and there's a frantic phone call, and someone tells me some other cat has come into the house first, and eaten our cat's food, and now, only it can get in & out and our cat is stuck in. oops.

so you have to ask how did the alien cat know to try  just then? I mean we know which cat it is and its lived around here for 5 years and it must know it couldn't get in thruogh the old catflap, so what told it that there was a new one? cunning eh.

two things - 1 there is a different learning mode which only leaves a 10 second window, but you have to have a tractable cat that will oblige and train the flap on demand - hard to do. there isn't a way to "migrate" the old cat learned IDs from an old flap to the new one (the way you migrate your contacts lists from old phones to new ones) which would be neat, especially if you had 30 cats! waiting to train all of them could be like, errrrrr, herding cats :-)

on the other hand, alien cats will have it purrrr0wned in 9 1/2 seconds!