May
29
2009
Finished reading Daniel Suarez’s The Daemon, in between getting grants and writing papers and such, this semester. This is maybe the best book I have read about technology, and its threats (as well as promises) in our immediate future, in the past year or two (and that is saying much when compared the likes of Charlie Stross, Neil Stephenson and Vernor Vinge).
Some might say this is cyberpunk reborn. Others might raise an eyebrow at some of the parallels to, for example, the Matrix trilogy and cyberpunk (the writing predates the Matrix trilogy AFAIK). This IS neo-cybperpunk, it has all the elements (underclass and high-technology), but it is better! Imagine William Gibson in his prime (Neuromancar), but a writer who is a real programmer and hacker, and knows plausible threats (and possibilities) that might emerge from the technology as it is currently implemented in our world. This is Suarez, and this is the brilliance of his book. As with the best of SF, it takes current trends and extrapolates them, to image a plausible (and chilling) near-future scenario. I’m not saying that the distribute AI Daemon he imagines is easy, or even likely to become reality. But so much in this work is spot on and insightful, in terms of the impacts of technology on our society and culture, and the struggles between nation-states, corporations and individuals (see Life Inc. ).
I loved this book, and can’t wait for the promised sequal coming in 2010 (hopefully that will be early rather than later in the year).
Oct
17
2008
Just finished this delightful little book, Rapture for the Geeks, by Dooling (see MacLeod’s Fall Revolution series for the origin of the expression of his title). A fun little book, and a bit different from what I was expecting. It is about the singularity, of course, but it also channels parts of the Jargon file / Hacker’s Dictionary, Raymond’s Art of Unix Programming and other works of Unix and Open Source advocacy, with a dash of the Science v. Religion discourse of the likes of Dennett, Hitchins and Dawkins.
I quite enjoyed the book, though there is nothing really new here in terms of an original contribution to the topics by Dooling. Those unfamiliar with the concept of the technological singularity, though, will find a lot of good references and ideas to follow up from here. Dooling collects quotes and excepts from all of the great original thinkers, from Turing through Kurzweil. I was right with him till probably the last chapter where, to my mind, he looses the courage of his convictions on the value of religion regarding its moral and philosophical contributions. He seems early on to be right with the scientists when talking about minds, brains and the “soul”. So found his wishy-washiness in the end a bit perplexing.
But as I said there is a lot of fun to be had. I haven’t mentioned my admiration of the poetry of Emily Dickenson yet in this blog. For some reason, she appears to appeal enormously to those of the geeky mindset, especially her poem about the Mind/Brain. Dooling presents a Python program version of Emily’s famous poem (again not his work, but that of Martelli and Ravenscroft of the Python Cookbook fame, and Google and, BTW, who are working with Guido, the inventor of Python, at Google on the Python language and other projects). It is an example of the pure poetry of programming in general, and the Python programming language in particular.
Jul
22
2008
I have recently been exploring social networking sites and collective intelligence algorithms. I suppose I am of the generation that just missed out on the Facebook/MySpace phenomenon. But I have always found recommendation engines from places like Amazon and Netflix quite useful. They provide an indirect type of socially augmented intelligence by using algorithms to find people with similar tastes, and then rate or recommend items indirectly based on their recommendations and their similarity to your own tastes. Newer sites like del.icio.us and last.fm take this to an explicit next step. These types of social networking sites allow you to actively find not only items that interest you (web sites and music respectively), but also people with similar interests and tastes to form explicit and ad-hoc social networks. See the new items on my side bar which should follow my del.icio.us bookmarks and last.fm music interests and activity from these sites.
One of the themes of this blog is Metacortices, the idea that the collective cognition of many people can be harnessed to perform more intelligent behaviors than would be possible from any of the individuals. Social networks, as I am describing them, do fit this definition to a degree, though the intelligent behavior being generated is really one that benefits the individuals by helping them make better choices, and find more interesting stuff. Though, look at collective intelligence and social games research for examples where people are designing systems based on playing games that do appear to create behavior that is more intelligent than any of the individual participants might do on their own.
A related concept that comes to mind looking at my del.icio.us and last.fm logs is the lifelog (also known as lifestream or total history). This is more in the realm of building an Exocortex, the idea of a constantly created log or memory of activities, thoughts, findings, etc. The basic idea of a lifelog is a technologically enhanced long-term episodic memory. Episodic memory is a type of long-term memory recognized by psychologists and cognitive scientists. It is the type of memory that allows us to store and recall episodes in our life, like our last birthday party, or what we ate for lunch yesterday. A lifelog would consist of a technologically enhanced person with devices that capture all video, images, audio and other type of sensory inputs, and stores and processes these logs in ways that make them searchable. Imagine a camera in your glasses taking video at 10 frames per second, being automatically meta-tagged with gps location information of where the photos occurred, and associated through temporal tags with other streams, such as audio or other, possibly uploading them to a Flickr stream, with auto-generated tags, etc.. The link given previously of Stross’s ideas on this subject propose a rapidly approaching capability to log and process this level of data for individual people because of increasing computing storage and processing power and mobility.
A lot of this interest was because of a new book I have been reading Collective Intelligence by Tobey Segaran. I think this is a wonderful book, almost on the level of Norvig’s Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp, in terms of giving concrete and hands-on views of the important algorithms and methods behind these intelligent systems. My graduate AI course this fall of 2008 will be using this book as our text and will concentrate on machine intelligence and collective intelligence methods.