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Can Your PC Become Neurotic?
Roland Piquepaille writes "This article starts with a quote from Douglas Adams: 'The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.' It is true that machines are becoming more complex and 'intelligent' everyday. Does this mean that they can exhibit unpredictable behavior like HAL, the supercomputer in '2001: A Space Odyssey'? Do we have to fear our PCs? A recent book by Thomas M. Georges, 'Digital Soul: Intelligent Machines and Human Values,' explains how our machines can develop neurosis and what kind of therapy exist. Check this column for a summary or read this highly recommended article from Darwin Magazine for more details."
I'm sitting here now, using an iBook to encode a 2001: A Space Odyssey DVD into a DivX, so I can then burn it onto a CD.
Not directly related, but as I was watching the Floyd's PanAm flight dock with the spinning station, I suspected that Clarke and Kubrick never foresaw this; a world of microtechnology, for the consumer. It was all grand projects back then, a single computer the size of a building, not a building full of single computers.
I know I'd swap a strong space program for strong video codecs; they seem so trivial compared to the vastness of infinity.
Well, I've babbled off-topic now. Daisy, daisy...
Here we go again with the over-personification.
There's a big difference between expecting past behavior to continue and actually being intelligent (and then going crazy) Sure, if you perform certain calculations enough time, the hardware might automatically optimize itself for that operation, but it's more like pixel burning on a tv, or forming a road simply by walking a path enough to form a noticable rut. Maybe when we truley have thinking computers we might have to worry about them going crazy, but until then I'm more worried about my toaster. I think it has a rash.....
-Space for rent
...is a clue-ful user. Ain't it funny how my(and i suspect most fellow /.'ers') computers run more or less flawlessly, while some of the machines I would have to work on when i did tech support would behave erratically, crash, and just plain not do things.
The article mentions "conflicting demands"---I imagine most of those are caused by having Gator, Bonzi buddy, et. al. put on your system (with or without the users knowlege doesnt really matter) as well as having a dozen things running in the system tray.
I wonder if background programs and spyware are the digital equivalent of having voices in one's head?
So, i'm not saying that educating users would solve all the "neurosis" problems, just that the majority of neurotic computers i've worked on were so due to some action of the user, whether it was installing spyware, deleting critical system files, or allowing three inches of cigarette dust to accumulate inside the case.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
We will clearly see more "intelligent" machines in the future. And the direction that current "artificial intelligence" is going this means that these machines will learn from what is out there.
This directly implies that the behavior of the machine will depend in a fuzzy way on the past "experience" of that machine. This however also means that we will not be able to predict exactly how it is behaving. Only in the way we can understand other peoples behavior that have also learned this behavior from the real world.
While these learning systems will make prediction difficult it will make explicit what the machine is trying to do through the learning process. While we wont know how a machine does "it" it will always present the right possible actions to us. Microsoft Word 21XX will clearly not need us to search menus if we want to change the formatting of the text.
Googlefight "Slashdot Troll" against "BSD is dying" 303:229. BSD thus cant die.
What he's refering to is the idea that naturally occuring complex systems form methods to deal with inconsistencies. To take his original example further, a child with two directions of action, "Have fun" and "Be careful", would mitigate both directions to a common path or direction. This mitigation only occurs because the child's brain is capable of understanding two directions and forming logical decisions based upon the needs of both. If the child was not able to perform this mitigation, you would see various neurosis form. The child might decide to follow only one original direction, to the exclusion of the other, or he or she might decide to do neither and sit in a corner. If this were to happen, we have names for these disorders. We might say the child is 'depressed', or the child is 'obsessive compulsive'. In evolutionary terms, natural selection would weed out those that did not have the ability to perform this mitigation.
Now, in complex systems that are not naturally occuring, these mitigation directives must be literally designed into the system itself. For instance, let's say you have two programs running with mutually exclusive goals. One programs goal would be to decrease thermal radiation by rewriting and redesigning circuitry. The other's goal would be to increase data throughput by doing the same things. How would they reconcile? Generally, a major way of decreasing thermal radiation is to reduce electrical input. But this also has a side effect of increasing the chance of data errors when the receiving component is not capable of distinguishing a signal from the backgrund noise. This decreases total data throughput. Now, if the two programs were not given explicit instructions on how to work cooperatively, they might do such things as form infinite loops by changing something the other program has already changed. One might find areas of circuitry that it has exclusive access to and change that circuitry with impunity. To anyone watching this process, the resulting circuitry would be hard to explain. Some components might become extremely fast while giving off enough heat to melt the sourrounding board, yet others would be slowed while running at a nice pleasant room temperature. Doesn't this sound like the equivelant of a neurosis?
I hate it when people say that computers are getting 'smarter'. They are *NOT* getting smarter. They are handling more tasks. They are getting FASTER. But, until it can handle things like associative pattern recognition (Ok. I made up that term. Basically, it's the idea that a computer can handle the following logic: It's not shaped like a coffee cup, but I know it's a coffee cup.) or can demonstrate the ability to learn and adapt to a changing environment at even REMOTELY the rate that even the simplest of creatures can... then, I'll consider them 'smart'.
Until then, by personifying computers, you are only FEEDING these types of irrational fears.
There is no HAL today, and probably won't be until we get a computer to recognize the fact that one everything in the universe is black and white. One and Off. The world isn't binary... it's analog.
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
I was working as a tech when Windows 95 came out, so I spent a LOT of time driver-wrestling. After a few weeks with Windows, it became patently obvious that the automatic hardware detection and driver handling in Win95 was so new and bad (partly because of poor hardware vendor support, incorrect INF files and so on) that often times, updating a driver became an exercise in trying to talk Windows info believing that I had a better driver than it did. When I realized that persuading children to do something basically works the same way, I started wondering HOW OLD IN HUMAN YEARS Windows 95 would score on a developmental test. Three years? Four years? Six Months?
Anyway, I never wrote a paper on it and tried to get it published because, well, it's a stupid idea. I'm pretty sure that anything our blinky-boxes are doing that might look like a level of intelligence worthy of psychological inquiry is pretty much due to the engineers that designed the thing getting their sh*t together and specifying the protocols more thoroughly.
One of the the really good things Windows did (that people love to forget about) is that it forced the standardization of hardware autodetection, peripheral interfaces and driver support across the industry. In 1995, every vendor had their own way of doing *EVERYTHING*, and when Microsoft told them you're gonna follow our spec or we're not supporting you, most of them listened. Sure we all bitch about driver problems and feature support, but trust me, The world is a better place now.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
The only thing in Physics right now that we believe is truly analog is the passage of time, but even then, time isn't really a measurable "thing", it's a measure of decay of objects (which in itself is quantized). So, in the very small world at least, everything *IS* binary.