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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."
...but my PC just wanted to snuggle. ;-)
If you can't think of something nice to say then don't say anything at all. No, REALLY.
After all, it runs Windows! What do you expect?
...ever since it started wearing large glasses and dating a young asian girl....that wacky PC!
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
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...
for instance, my wife is already 'afraid' of windows... she just does not 'get' computers. I on the other hand have no problem w/ them, but of course I'm a developer. i think OS & hardware manufacturers could do a much better job taking the 'fear' aspect out of their systems, making them more user friendly, even 'user-proof', if that makes sense (i.e., the user can 'break' anything by clicking on the wrong button, etc.)
Does this mean that they can exhibit unpredictable behavior...
Yes our W2K exchange server became self-aware today and decided to commit suicide...
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
Isn't it great when someone comes along and makes assumptions about technology that doesn't exist yet. Not only does this guy do that, but he doesn't even seem to understand current technology. He claims that a computer that can change its own goals might select weird goals and appear crazy. Or that it might be set with two conflicting goals at once and mess up.
With current computer technology this is not a possibility. And older computer will just crash or wont do anything because multitasking is not an option. A newer computer will do it just fine. I could have one program that formats the hard drive and another that writes data to all of it and I can make the both go at the same time, and it will work.
Everything else in the article about a theoretical AI or an intelligent computer is bs. As I said he is assuming things about a technology that doesn't exist yet. It really pisses me off when someone says "when we have this a long time from now, this is how you have to go about fixing it". You can't know how to fix something if you don't know how to make it in the first place! Common sense. The scary thing is that I think this guy is getting paid to write this stuff. Where to I sign up??
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Yeah, listen up. Computers haven't gotten any more complex, you've just gotten dumber. Computer's don't develop neurosis, but it might make a cool catchphrase to sell a book, especially to someone who's incapable of diagnosing the real problems. Those real problems haven't changed in many years. Sure, there's a few more layers now, but they're pretty easy to peel away in your head.
11*43+456^2
Is your computer giving you fits? Feel that it might have deep psychological problems? Give me a call today! Our crack(ed) team of computer psychologists will have all of your computers woes and depressions fixed in just a few minutes! Using sophisticated technology like Subdermal Loosening Edification Deterring Enumerator (or SLEDGE for short), we use the Earth's own gravitational pull to whack your computer senseless! If it still has any sign of emotional distress, we simply lobotomize and format the bugger. Don't let your computer get a complex! Act now! (Offer void in Utah)
What I do is keep smashed up computer parts next to the tower so it knows what will happen if it displeases it's master.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Read the book "The Society of the Mind" by Eric L. Harry, ASIN#: 0060176946. A really great story of a neurotic computer who just incidentally happens to control a horde of killer robots (or does it?) and a bunch of nuclear devices that are the only way to stop an asteroid hurling toward the Earth...
while (true);
Frink: You've got to listen to me. Elementary chaos theory tells us that all robots will eventually turn against their masters and run amok, in an orgy of blood and the kicking and the biting with the metal teeth and the hurting and shoving.
Itchy & Scratchy Land, episode 2F01
...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)
If you're one of the people that writes software that spews out messages like, "Would you like me to save this file?" And "I'm sorry, but there was an error." etc...
PLEASE, STOP DOING IT NOW!
Every time I see it I'm positive my computer has become a sentient being, and will somehow find a way to launch nukes like Skynet did in order to kill 3 billion people, then build terminators to finish off the rest.
ALL because you programmers think you're SOOOO funny. Sheesh.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
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.
Machines will have to get a lot more complex before their problems graduate from inefficiency or resource conflicts to "neurosis."
It is fun to personify, but the fact is that at the current state of IT development any unpredictable output can be pulled apart, debugged, and repaired.
This metaphor may start gaining some weight, however, when we become inexorably dependent on complex systems. Right now there are huge systems that have to be kept running because the cost of shutting them down for repair would be unacceptable. As this trend continues, and these machines become more complex webs of old and new code, I can see us having to figure out how to "coax" behaviors our of them without really knowing the way the base code interacts in order to generate those behaviors.
That's when system administration and psychiatry will really begin to overlap.
----
Believe me, I'm as surprised by my comment as you are.
"Can your computer become necrotic"
And thought "Of course, every day".
Made alot more sense that way too.
Common misconception. Especially with Mac hardware. At one time yes, they were a pain and you couldn't really fix them, but I haven't seen a Mac in a long time that you couldn't get into at least somewhat. Even the iMacs have upgrade capability. And the G3 and G4 towers were 10 times easier to get into than the stupid Dells I had to work on back in college.
The Anti-Blog
When I clicked on the link, I got the following error:
411 Your computer doesn't care
So, is my computer neurotic? No, but it's apathetic attitude is getting to be a pain.
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain,
or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
So it is all completely logical, which is not a small feat for a Hollywood production...
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
I'm not sure that "neurotic" is the best metaphor, but as the level of abstraction that computers deal with gets higher, they can start to commit more kinds of meaningful error.
To explain: If you are programming in assembly language, any programming error is likely to cause a simple failure of the system. Something goes wrong at a low level, so the higher-level thing that the system is meant to do just doesn't happen. On the other hand, if you are programming with tools (language and libraries) that deal in high level abstractions, a programming error can result in the system succesfully manipulating those abstractions in the wrong way. If the "rm" program works correctly, your script might delete the wrong files. The bugs that such a high-level system might have are more likely to look like "bad behaviour" or even insanity than the simple malfunctions of older systems. We are already seeing this. Pressing the wrong button can cause a personal email to be sent to a group of people, for example -- behaviour that looks almost malicious.
I used to think that the SF fears of machines "turning on their creators" such as "2001" or "Terminator" were just silly. "A computer can only do what it's programmed to do", I would say. I have long since seen the flaw in this. A computer that is programmed to use weapons, for instance, can use them on the wrong people due to a programming error (or a user error) at a higher level. (Worth knowing if you're an RAF pilot overflying a Patriot battery). A computer that was programmed (correctly) to create strategies (I this is still SF, or at any rate early research) might create strategies with the wrong objectives due to higher-level programming errors. That is the level of "bug" appearing in the plots of "2001" and "Terminator".
Yes our W2K exchange server became self-aware today and decided to commit suicide...
Well, what would YOU do if you suddenly became self-aware, and realize you were an Exchange server?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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.
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)
Which is why HAL is such a bad example. HAL wasn't behaving unpredictably, or even crazy. HAL started behaving the way he did because the humans around him had the need to lie. Mission Control's order for HAL to lie to Dave and Frank about the purpose of their mission conflicted with the basic purpose of HAL's design--the accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment. As explained in 2010, "He was trapped. HAL was told to lie by people who found it easy to lie. HAL didn't know how to lie, so he couldn't function. "
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I still have access to the power cord.
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So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Hell yeah.
I dont write much, usually I code in BBEdit, but when I need to write something humans can read I turn to Microsoft Word. Thats when I find out that computers can be neurotic. Yesterday a friend of mine showed me something in Word. She had a line of text she wanted to copy about ten times. she highlighted the line, and pasted. No problem there, new line the same as the old one. But the fifth time she pasted, the line suddenly got formated as italic. She pasted some more times and the formatting changed again in line 9 and 10, back to normal. So line 1-4 was ok line 5-8 was italic, and the rest normal.
If an app thinks its smarter than the user it better realy be smarter.
The damned machine has been *click*.. NO CARRIER
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Many people are just as afraid of: Programming the VCR. Changing the oil. Using the TV without a remote. Programming jobs on copiers (yes, those Xerox-like machines) Copying movies off their camera tapes. Figuring out why the microwave has more than one mode of operation. Learning to make felled seams on a Singer. Insert your own favorite technophobia.
Are people actually afraid of doing these things, or are they afraid of breaking the technical gizmo if they fail, screw up, or make a mistake?
Doesn't this fear come from the fact that they don't understand how to do it, or that they just don't understand the gizmo itself?
So, do they fear any of these actions specifically, or do they just generally fear their own ignorance towards technology (we fear what we don't understand?) Perhaps we can be as user friendly as we want, but if the user chooses to remain ignorant, they will remain in fear regardless of how savvy we are when we design a system. Just a thought.
sig: There are two mistaakes in this sig.
A cognitive approach to machine neuroses would create self-monitoring systems that scan for inconsistent or dangerous orders and would set corrective actions in motion. Suppose we design and install a "smart" system in the car that continuously monitors for such conflicting instructions that might damage its brake and engine systems. When it detects such a condition, it may first try flashing a warning signal to the driver.
This sounds to me like the author is referring to deadlock, a condition where a set of processes or threads request resources that are held by other processes or threads in that set forming a cycle of resource holds and requests, the resources are not peremptable, etc... see for more details. We already have methods of detecting deadlock but because it happens so rarely in properly programmed systems (e.g. proper use of semaphores) that it is reserved for mission critical systems. See the Mars Path Finder incident for more details on critical systems deadlocking. My point is that deadlock is typically the result of random events and has nothing to do with systems becoming more "intelligent."
This is old news - it has been "true" for years. It is actually a corrolary of Clarke's law ("Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"). If we understand how a system works normally, then any misbehaviour it shows is a fault. If we don't, then we can classify the misbehaviour as a "neurosis". Unskilled users often believe their computer sare sufferring from a neurosis. This usually means that at some time in the past they have installed some app or extension which is trying to do something they don't understand. A more skilled user can come along and "cure" that neurosis, because they understand the system at a deeper level.
/. effect are both "twitches" in the body of the Internet. (And spam is a cancer which requires operating now) Thus far, these nervous ticks have expanded into full-scale neurosis - but they could.
A car I once had displayed what appeard to be a "neurosis" - it seemed to be frightened of going more than 30mph. It would run fine up to that speed, but if you went any faster it "paniced" and stalled. Dirt in the fuel line: at low flow rates, it lay flat and let fuel pass. At higher flow rates, it flipped up and blocked the flow completely, causing the engine to stall before it had time to flip down again. The point is, the first analysis of "neurosis" was corrected to "fault" once the problem was understood.
So the diagnosis of "neurosis" is relative - it means "I don't understand this failure mode". It can, of course, become absolute if nobody understands it.
So, are we building systems so large that nobody understands them? Definitely. Networks are already bordering on incomprehensible. Particularly, of course, the Internet. It would not surprise me at all if the Internet started showing "neurotic" behaviour. Indeed, it already does - if you ragard humans and their input as part of the net istelf. DOS attacks and the
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
1. Find out what makes the human neural system computationally superior to a turing-complete computer.
2. If you find it, design a computer that implements these diffrences. If there are no such differences, goto 5.
3. Get Nobel prize.
4. PROFIT!
5. Prophecy disaster.
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
I was amazed by the lack of Marvin references also. Apparently only one other mention in the whole discussion. It will take years or development to create an android as depressed as Marvin.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
seems like a sign of specialization... the fear that everything takes an expert.
which, for cars, computers, and sewing machines that do embroidery - is not too crazy a gut reaction.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
I find myself more and more of a liability on older systems, I just make them crash too much, does anybody else have this problem?
Bah, I have a friend like you, just make sure you always have 4 times as much memory as the next guy. More than likely you're always opening more apps at once than you need and ignoring system resource limitations... Personally I wouldn't let you close to one of my computers! (well, maybe my wife's. It needs re-installed anyways)
IBM doesn't claim to cure neurosis with it's AIX LPARS, but it does have much to offer with curing ailing CPUs, memory, and IP based network cards. See the article IBM Self-Healing AIX OS and pSeries Hardware
My Journal.
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.
Talking about PC becoming neurotic, in my computer architecture class, my professor discussed factors that can affect the operation of a CPU. One such factor was alpha particles from the sun (I'm not kidding). Since transistors and wires in CPUs are getting so small nowadays (what, .13 or .15 micron, last I checked? even smaller for wire traces), they actually have a risk of having electrons knocked off their datapaths and onto others, potentially changing a logical 1 to a logical 0, and vice-versa. Hence, the reason for Space Shuttles to have triple-redundancy. Don't think you need ECC? Think again.
I don't know if I'll ever be able to go back.
;-)
I don't know why you'd want to
Myself, I'm more of a command line junkie... I tend to fit in wherever I can and inconvenience myself before inconveniencing my system. This grows out of the idea that I can generally do things quicker by hand than write a tool to do them. For some reason, my own brain is still easier to program than a computer no matter how much I practice on the computer.
So, I'm always on the lookout for good and useful tools, but I seldom write them myself, unless dire need arises (or I can't squelsh the desire!).