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When Things Start to Think
One underlying theme dear to Gershenfeld's heart is the death of traditional academic distinctions between physics and engineering, or between academia and commerce. Applied research is real research.
Another major theme is that older technologies should be treated with respect as we seek to supplement or replace them. For example, a laptop's display is much harder to read in most light than the paper in a book.
The book starts by drawing a contrast between Digital Revolution and Digital Evolution. Digital Revolution is the already-tired metaphor for universal connectivity to infinite information and memory via personal computers, the Internet, etc. Digital Evolution describes a more democratic future, from Gershenfeld's point of view, when computers are so smart, cheap, and ubiquitous that they do many ordinary chores to help ordinary people. When things talk to things, human beings are set free to do work they find more appealing.
"What are things that think?" asks the first section of the book.
Gershenfeld's whizbang examples won't be big news to Slashdot readers. My favorite, the Personal Fabricator, ("a printer that outputs working things instead of static objects")-- whose relationship to a full machine shop analog is like that of the Personal Computer to the old-fashioned mainframe. Gershenfeld actually has one of these in his lab (it outputs plastic doohickeys)--seeing it was one of the high points of my visit there.
"Why should things think?" asks the second section.
My favorite here is the Bill of Rights for machine users. (In true Baby-Boom style, it's of list of wants arbitrarily declared to be rights.) "You have the right to
Have information available when you want it, where you want it, and in the form you want it
Be protected from sending or receiving information that you don't want
Use technology without attending to its needs"
Under the heading "Bad Words," Gershenfeld offers a snide but useful summary of many high-tech pop-sci buzzwords, showing how they get misused by people who don't understand their real content or context.
"How will things that think be developed?"
By making them small and cheap. By getting industry to pay the bills for targeted, practical research, using the Media Lab model TTT ("Things That Think.") By reorganizing education on the model of the Media Lab, where students learn things as they need them for practical projects, not all at once in a huge, abstract lump.
The book concludes with directions to various websites, including the Physics and Media Group (One of their projects these days is "Intrabody Signaling.") Slashdotters might also be interested in Gershenfeld's textbooks The Nature of Mathematical Modeling and The Physics of Information Technology.
You can purchase When Things Start To Think from bn.com, and Amazon has the book paperback discounted to $11.20. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I think we are going to look back a hundered years from now and say how silly we were to ever believe computers could think like we do.
How is a computer program ever going to adopt abstract thinking and creativity? Is a computer program ever going to invent mathematics without previous knowledge of it just because it finds it to be a useful utility for solving problems?
Heck, if someone could write a decent language translation program I might think there is a hope.
Humans already have loads of free time now and what do we do? We piss it away watching Jerry Springer and WWF eating cheezy poof's on the sofa turning into fat slobs.
For me, I'd rather spend a little more time outside and with real people instead of wiring myself more than I already am.
Technology has it's place...serving me not usurping me.
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
10:27am up 46 days, 18:02, 19 users, load average: 0.69, 0.35, 0.23
I must be late.
-JPJ
Feh.
One underlying theme dear to Gershenfeld's heart is the death of traditional academic distinctions between physics and engineering, or between academia and commerce. Applied research is real research.
How would he know? MIT Media Lab, under Nicholas Negroponte, don't do anything that any academic or industry practitioner would consider to be "research". You see, in the words of Negroponte, they live in a world not of "atoms" but of "bits". In the world of atoms, researchers have to produce such things as peer-reviewed papers and working prototypes. In the world of "bits", researchers are measured by the number of column inches they get in Wired magazine. MIT Media lab churns out books and articles by the tonne, but it's little better than scifi, most of it, and very little of it is even original.
You would think that the hard-headed engineers at MIT would have seen that the Emperor has no clothes and would have cut off their funding by now, but mysterious the Media Lab clings to life. They are an embarassment to real futurists everywhere. Contrast them with the work done at IBM's labs, or BT's, or even Nokia, where stuff is made that actually makes an impact on the real world a decade or two later.
Here is a poem that illustrate the limitations of a computerized brain:
No program can say what another will do.
Now, I won't just assert that, I'll prove it to you:
I will prove that although you might work til you drop,
you can't predict whether a program will stop.
Imagine we have a procedure called P
that will snoop in the source code of programs to see
there aren't infinite loops that go round and around;
and P prints the word "Fine!" if no looping is found.
You feed in your code, and the input it needs,
and then P takes them both and it studies and reads
and computes whether things will all end as the should
(as opposed to going loopy the way that they could).
Well, the truth is that P cannot possibly be,
because if you wrote it and gave it to me,
I could use it to set up a logical bind
that would shatter your reason and scramble your mind.
Here's the trick I would use - and it's simple to do.
I'd define a procedure - we'll name the thing Q -
that would take and program and call P (of course!)
to tell if it looped, by reading the source;
And if so, Q would simply print "Loop!" and then stop;
but if no, Q would go right back to the top,
and start off again, looping endlessly back,
til the universe dies and is frozen and black.
And this program called Q wouldn't stay on the shelf;
I would run it, and (fiendishly) feed it itself.
What behaviour results when I do this with Q?
When it reads its own source, just what will it do?
If P warns of loops, Q will print "Loop!" and quit;
yet P is supposed to speak truly of it.
So if Q's going to quit, then P should say, "Fine!" -
which will make Q go back to its very first line!
No matter what P would have done, Q will scoop it:
Q uses P's output to make P look stupid.
If P gets things right then it lies in its tooth;
and if it speaks falsely, it's telling the truth!
I've created a paradox, neat as can be -
and simply by using your putative P.
When you assumed P you stepped into a snare;
Your assumptions have led you right into my lair.
So, how to escape from this logical mess?
I don't have to tell you; I'm sure you can guess.
By reductio, there cannot possibly be
a procedure that acts like the mythical P.
You can never discover mechanical means
for predicting the acts of computing machines.
It's something that cannot be done. So we users
must find our own bugs; our computers are losers!
by Geoffrey K. Pullum
Stevenson College
University of California
have you been defaced today?
To quote Joe vs. the Volcano: '99% of people go through life asleep; the remaining 1% walk around in a state of constant amazement.'
To add to that I'd say: 99% of people *think* they're awake; the remaining 1% know they've got some waking up to do.
There you have it, your Zen moment of the day.
To be quite honest, if I'm still waiting for a Photoshop render, or a level to load in RTCW, our machines aren't ready to think.