Moderators: I came in late, but I think I have something substantial to say, here. Can you help me out?
Message begins:
Hey Chris --
I remember you posting about the Mindpixel project several years back on the comp.ai.* hierarchy, before it was called the Mindpixel project, back when you were first attempting to build the Corpus.
(For those of you just jumping in here, I'll quote from Chris' website:
MindPixel, MindPixel, I guess I should define a MindPixel...
A MindPixel is a kernel sentence of consensus fact, such as:
- The sky is usually blue:TRUE - It is difficult to swim with ski pants on:TRUE - Water is a dry powder:FALSE - Mars is the first word is this sentence:TRUE
MindPixels are always binary and are answered by most people in the same way when instructed 'Respond as you think most human beings would respond'.
I call these MindPixels because it is my strong opinion that with a very large number of MindPixels, we can create a high dimensional image of consciousness. Where each kernel sentence is one pixel in that image.
The brilliant part (IMHO) of what Chris has described is his method of determining whether or not a system is, in fact, conscious, called the Minimum Intelligent Signal Test, or MIST. Where the Turing Test is completely subjective, the MIST is objective. It uses a series of binary (yes/no) questions to establish a threshhold for human-level cognition. With it, any system can be tested and rated based on its deviation from chance (50%).
So, as I remember you were flamed pretty hard at the time by the comp.ai.* yokels. Not that THAT means anything; they hate EVERYONE. But there were a few trenchant critiques there that I don't remember you answering adequately.
The big one that sticks out in my mind is the following: For your corpus, there seems to be some small problem regarding certain types of binary questions. For instance, those questions which depend having more data about the situation to provide the correct answer (i.e. "Is P-e4 a good move?") or can meaningfully be answered either way ("Are human beings often blue?"). Your response was that ambiguous questions like these will be eliminated from the Corpus, but some might say that you are solving the problem of intelligence by eliminating the intelligent questions. Can your Corpus function as successful training data and create a system approximating our own level of cognition when it encapsulates such a narrow slice of human intelligence?
(My own idea was that the MIST needed to be expanded from a binary to a quaternary model so that it could reflect the knowledge that some questions can be answered both ways, and some questions simply don't make sense. Call it the "yes/no/both/huh" variant.)
Also, I seem to recall some criticism based on information theory grounds; the idea that even with billions of these buggers, you still won't have enough to do anything meaningful with.
Care to update us? I found your work fascinating the last time, and am glad to see you continuing it.
OK, my node-state has decided to bring back the institution of slavery. Anyone can sell themself, or their children, into slavery. The majority of the node-state's citizens have decided that this is a good idea. Any outsider who objects is a cultural imperialist.
There's two points worth making here.
1) I think, if we view people like packets, part of the "protocol" has to include free speech, free access to information, and the right to travel. For all people. Without these three things, a network like this cannot work. So out-and-out slavery would be against the protocol.
2) As far as it goes, I'd rather have small isolated patches of people doing things I personally disagree with, than a one-world state in which those things I consider moral wrongs are forced on 6 billion people at once.
It really depends on whether your perfect idea of the world is one where you govern everybody because you're the only one who knows what's right, or whether you believe everyone should have the freedom to govern themselves.
Or how about this: We all just order what we want to eat. No voting at all, just individual choice. So long as I'm not filching from your plate and vice-versa, everyone's happy.
The idea of a one-human-being government is something interesting, at least to consider. However, it seems to ignore the whole point of government in the first place, which is to make it easier for us all to work and live together. If everyone's a sovereign state, then we're likely to be at war with one another constantly.
Assuming you meant something broader than that, we're left with the question, "Who's idea of individual rights do we get?" Abortion is a good example. Let's say you think the right to choose is an individual right that should be protected. And again, 51% of polite society agrees with you.
However, the other 49% think that the fetus is the one with the individual rights that should be protected, and to them, you're the villain.
The way it is here, no matter what solution we decide, at least 49% of our population is being denied what they see as a fundamental right.
I think people can legitimately differ on areas of moral controversy like this. In my world of node-states, abortion is practiced in 49% of them, and against the law in the other 51%. Those people who don't like the node they're in have two options: They can try to change it (and again, it's much more realistic to imagine changing the minds of the small population of your node than to acquire the resources and clout to change the minds of the Supreme Court), or they can move to one that already agrees with them.
I know this is a radical idea, but the Internet was once, too. The Node-State is just a refinement of how we can best achieve justice and freedom as we all live together. It might be thought of as the next step in a chain of thought that stems from the Code of Hammurabi to the Magna Carta to the Constitution. I think technology could allow us to do away with our bloated representative democracy and replace it with an even better system, one that's truer to those ideals of justice and freedom, one that doesn't oppress through bigness.
I can imagine the "protocols" for commerce being hammered out like nearly any open-source project, perhaps somewhat like a game of Nomic, if you've ever read any Douglas Hofstadter books. And in many ways, this idea is really just an update of the original idea of the United States as a nation in which the power resided in individual states instead of a strong federal government.
Try to imagine the world 100 years in the future. For me, it seems as if we'll either all be under the bureaucratic thumb of a giant world government (which may mean all the best for us, but will still be unjust by virtue of its bigness), or we could divest these governments and corporations of their power and give it back to small, unified groups of people.
You know, whenever anyone talks about the future myriad combinations of Internet and government, we always seem to get the most obvious, uninventive predictions. "File your taxes online! Vote online! Go to the DMV online!" Faster methods of doing things exactly the same way we do them right now.
Isn't anyone else out there thinking that maybe this kind of technology has the ability to change the way we think of government itself?
For instance, I wonder to myself sometimes if there isn't a new way to model the political boundaries of the world along the lines of the Internet. Here's a vision: A world where small individual node-states conduct commerce with each other by following universally agreed upon protocols, but remain largely autonomous internally. In much the same way as it doesn't matter whether or not you hook up a Mac, Wintel, or Linux box to the net as long as you send and recieve packets the way you're supposed to, couldn't we imagine a world where these little node-states allowed people the maximum amount of freedom to live the way they wanted as long as they followed agreed-upon procedures for routing goods and people through them?
I imagine a patchwork quilt of different autonomous mini-states, like websites, each where the people living there determine their own rules. True freedom requires exactly this kind of diversity.
As the world's population gets larger and more interconnected, it's crucial to note: Democracies become less virtuous as they become large, and any sufficiently large democracy is indistinguishible from tyranny. Don't believe me? All right, here's an analogy.
Let's say we all want to go out to dinner. All 100 of us. 49 of us happen to be vegetarians.
At Restaurant X, the procedure is simple. There's one big table, and one waitron. We all go, sit down, look at the menu and vote. Everyone eats what the majority decides. Unfortunately, 51% of us wanted the Filet Mignon (which we heard was quite good here). This leaves 49% of us without anything to eat. Democracy isn't always so tasty after all.
But at Restaurant Y, they have 10 tables. You still have to vote at each table, and the majority still determines what everybody eats, but now we have 99% of our party happy: 5 tables of 10 meat-eaters, 4 tables of 10 vegetarians, and one table with 9 happy vegetarians and 1 meat-eater who doesn't get to eat what he wants. Maybe he'll ask if he can pull a chair up to the table behind him?
Extrapolate this meat-and-veggie conflict to more contentious issues like abortion (or even IP laws) and it's easy to see how democracies are only virtuous when they're small.
So how big is a node-state? I live in the U.S., and as a practical test-case, I'm going to say county-sized. I think the modern county has the approximate amount of people that the Founders based our ideal of democracy on. But in all honesty, I think science and technology could help determine what the proper size for a semi-autonomous unit of governance should be. It's not impossible to model, and the idea seems exciting to me.
In any case, I find myself excited and curious: how can the technologies we have enable us to envision new ideas of government, in which we can all live freer lives? Any thoughts the ideas I've mentioned are appreciated, too.
Luddite... broadly : one who is opposed to especially technological change
Part of the point, though, is that being against one instance of technology does not make you a Luddite. You can't generalize from that.
Some people are against handguns. They're not Luddites. In a similar way, being against a certain Internet technology (say, cookies) doesn't make you a Luddite.
These days, the word functions less as an insightful label than an epithet. It's just a chestnut that's thrown out to shut people up. So when I hear it, my ears prick up. Very rarely is it used with any utility.
"Labelling others may be an overused rhetorical tool, but sometimes it's valid. You don't always automatically lose the argument just because you call somebody a Luddite, Communist, Isolationist, Zealot, or even Katz's favorite, 'Corporatist'. Sometimes the label fits."
Of course, if someone IS a Communist, or a Luddite, or whatever, it's not only valid but good to call them what they are.
The point is that lots of labels are used to dismiss someone instead of evaluate their argument. Katz's "neo-Luddite" rag this time around is a good example. Just because you might think someone's conception of a certain technology is ill thought out doesn't mean you want to destroy all machinery and live in a pre-Industrial Revolution utopia.
It's freaky to me how hard it is to dialogue on tech issues with some people. Give one example of why one technology might have unwelcome consequences and they assume you're living in a shack in Montana.
I sticks by what I said. First person to call the other guy a Luddite without examining his argument loses.
I've had some really great experiences in lines! Like the line for the first showing of the Phantom Menace, which was a better experience than the movie itself. Or the times I've camped out waiting for concert tickets to go on sale. Even when I recently had to go in to contest some parking tickets ("Hey! More of my car was parked out of the No Parking Zone than in it!") I ended up sitting in a waiting room with a lot of other really interesting people who I'd never have met otherwise, and really got a sense of my community that I didn't have before.
Lines aren't necessarily bad. I would say a future of NO lines would be a lot worse. Like we don't sit at home and play Quake enough as it is!
Also: I think it's a rather hackeyed line to say that anyone who casts a critical eye on where a given technology takes us is a "neo-Luddite". It's lazy, and it isn't even true. From here on in, I'm establishing Crash's Corollary : When someone participating in a tech discussion refers to the opposing side as Luddites (or any variation thereof) without examining the issues raised by them, the argument is ended in favor of the opposing side.
What's wrong with Radio Shack sponsoring a trip to the Moon? Why nothing at all, you lousy communists out there. And there's nothing wrong with using lasers to turn the Moon into a giant Pepsi symbol, either. That's just good old fashioned capitalism, you hippies! If you ever worked a day in your life, you'd know that! And if Coca-Cola wants to distribute star maps to schools where Ursa Major is now labelled as "The Coca-Cola Polar Bear", well, we've got kids looking at the stars, don't we? Isn't that good enough, you lousy stinking beatniks?
Up with capitalism! Down with beatniks!
I vote that the National Academy of Arts and Sciences auctions off the right to the names in the Periodic Table of the Elements. What's the difference whether it's called Mercury or AOLium? Not a lick, you heathens. No difference at all.
Get with the program, or get the hell out of the way. Understand?
... a giant Lego brick, so big it could be seen from space. Take that, Great Wall of China! My personal preference is for a red one.
Miyazaki On A Popsicle Stick
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Essential Anime
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· Score: 1
I'm sure zillions of people are going to say this, but your best bet in anime is to check out Hayao Miyazaki's work, such as Kiki's Delivery Service, Totoro, Porco Rosso (The Crimson Pig), and Laputa (Castle In The Sky). Princess Mononoke, too, if you haven't seen that in theaters already.
The best parts of Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli films (his studio) aren't just the characters, but the rich, full, colorful, vibrant worlds he puts them in. Also, he's famous for his sweeping flying scenes. I just watched a fansub of the Crimson Pig the other day, and was just blown away. We've become so reliant on computers for effects, we've lost the appreciation for what human beings can do by hand without them. Just amazing. Do a web search for Hayao Miyazaki, and you won't go wrong.
Oh, and check out Hotaru no haka (Grave of the Fireflies) while you're at it. It's not, strictly speaking, a Miyazaki film, but it's a Studio Ghibli release with his fingerprints all over it. It's a shame there are so few Ghibli movies. What I want to know from everyone else out there is: What else lives up to the Studio Ghibli standard?
Two words make my ears prick up when I see them in any piece of technology journalism: "impossible" and "inevitable". When either shows up (like the latter did here), I know the writer is in the grips of an ideology and is no longer trustworthy as a reporter. Both words represent an extremist position where there is no room for dialogue (or any change at all!) and are only meant to polarize people into groups.
Think more before you use these words, Jon. Better yet, don't use them at all.
Recently NPR's Science Friday dared to match up Bill Joy's earnest and informed critiques of coming ultratechnologies (like AI, nanotech, & genetics) with Ray Kurzweil's earnest and informed paeans to them. The show was fantastic.
Ray at one point talked about how the age of biological evolution is over, how technological evolution had simply taken its place. Biological humanity would wither on the vine, he predicted, replaced in the long term by our superior robot progeny. He loved this. He's not alone, either. Nearly every major AI researcher I've read about (think Hans Moravec or Rodney Brooks) has echoed similar sentiments.
Personally, the techno-rapturists frighten me much more than the non-techno-rapturists. They frighen me the way all apocalyptics frighten me, but the difference is that the techno-rapturists have the power to make their prophecies real.
So, to that end: What about you? Is it all over for humanity? Will machines infiltrate more and more of our bodies and society until humanity itself no longer exists? And do you think this is a good thing?
I'm one of the folks who read Slashdot quite often, but who don't define themselves as "geeks". There's a reason why.
When I was young, sent to the library each day at noon to plunk away on an Apple ][ because they didn't have a reading group I fit in, the isolation I felt didn't really contain any social power. Computers were necessary tools. Not "cool", by any means. At least, not to others. By and large, there wasn't much you could impress Joe Average with. In fifth grade, being a wiz at even the newest videogames (Swashbuckler, anyone?) wasn't anything compared to being good at kickball on the playground. Being a geek meant you had little to no social power.
How times have changed!
Computers are good for everything now. Computers are cool! And being good at, say, creating images with Photoshop or 3DMax, or music with FastTracker 2 or your own MIDI setup, or setting up your own netbox with Linux -- these things are tremendously cool in the eyes of almost anybody. The tables have turned. It's now the idiot kid who ISN'T on the Internet that's made to feel ostracized.
And just as when Jocks held the lion's share of social power, and used it to shame and ridicule others, Geeks have proven themselves no more virtuous. Geeks present their standard -- technical knowledge -- as the only one worth being judged by, just like Jocks of the past used their standard of physical prowess.
And judge they do! Far more harshly, I think, than most Jocks ever did. I can hear the Jock Horror stories echoing up from Slashdot's depths, but the fact remains that the psychic trauma of being shoved into a locker as an anonymous body will nearly always pale in comparison to being scrutinized and evaluated for your intellectual merits -- being ridiculed for who you are on the inside -- and found wanting.
Or to say it another way: Geeks are fucking brutal. And what's worse? They're taking over. The world is rapidly becoming less and less comprehensible to Joe Average, and the Geeks don't see anything wrong with that. "It's MY turn NOW!", or so the feeling goes. And so we're left in a world being dominated by those who nurse wounds inflicted upon them ages ago; those who prefer the digital communiques of Quake clan members to switching off the box and finding a girl to dance with. We're left in a world ruled by those who carry the deepest grudge against it, and have the power to make payback hurt.
I think, on the very deepest level, many Geeks hate being human beings. They look back on the social awkwardness they experienced in the past and say, "If this pain is what it means to be human, then fuck being human. Flood me with nanotech. Replace my neurons with processors. Make me into something else. Because I don't want to be what I am now."
What a terrifying state for the world to be in. It terrifies me, at any rate.
Admittedly, this is all rather broad, and I think I share a common history with many of the people who are aching to rise up in flames right now. (Assuming this post isn't too late to actually be seen.) There are geekish aspects to me, too. But I still want to be a human being. I want to be sociable rather than knowledgable. I like people! I like being around them, finding out about them, smoking with them, drinking with them, and I don't want my body flooded with nanotech. No future world of quantum-computer-powered star radiation analyzation digital epiphanies will ever compare to being kissed on the lips by a girl you are so damned in love with.
If Geeks could only learn to love and treasure other people once more, the way they longed for the companionship of others as kids, I think I'd be proud to call myself one.
Until then, I'm just an average person.
And that, despite what you might think, is a wonderful, wonderful feeling.
"It may be a question whether machinery does not encumber... whether we have not lost, by refinement, some energy, some vigor of wild virtue. The harm of the improved machinery may compensate its good." Not the Unabomber. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self Reliance."
I'll be the first to admit, the first time I saw "South Park" on Comedy Central, I laughed out loud. The juxtaposition of kindergarten construction-paper aesthetics with graphic sexual content was pretty damn funny for the first couple shows. Hilarious, even.
But Jon Katz's übermorality schtick is really grating on me, here.
I'm always disgusted when ideologues use the protection of children as an excuse to rape the rights and privileges of adults. (2nd Amendment rights come to mind as a primary example, here.)
I am *equally* disgusted, however, when ideologues (like Jon Katz) promote children as some bizarre sort of breed of "adults from the future"; as beings who exist on a higher intellectual plane than their parents, and should therefore be immune to the backward rules that we primitives would foist upon them.
Both attitudes come from exactly the same mentality; the ultra-glorification of childhood. Both sets of ideologues believe in their shriveled bleeding hearts that adolescents are so perfect and precious that their well-being supersedes that of the adult society they exist in.
But what always is neglected in these conversations is that these adolescents *become* the adult society at some point. You don't protect children by denying adults certain rational rights -- such as gun ownership -- because the damage you do to their future society outweighs the damage you protect them from.
Conversely, adolescents are not miniature adults. Childhood, adolescence, and even teenage years are still primarily formative ones. Jon Katz practically guffaws at the the idea that children are different in any fundamental ways than adults: "...as if any exposure to graphic language and scatological humor will damage the fragile young," he says. The-Geeks-vs.-The-Moralists. Well, hell! Why not shoot some smack in front of your kids, then? As if any exposure to illicit narcotic usage will damage the fragile young. Why not invite them to an orgy? They know what sex is, don't they? While were at it, let's add some shiny, happy incest, too! There's no reason it should be wrong for a father to fuck his 10-year-old daughter, right, Jon? As if it could damage her! Ha! How truly ludicrous! Those goddamned moralists. Always telling you and me what to do.
My point is that we *all* have some morality, and we all foist it upon others. It's perfectly reasonable to see the "South Park" movie as a vehicle of another morality. It's actually unreasonable not to.
And I wonder how much those of us who have children now, or plan to someday, would like to teach the morality of "South Park" to our kids. Hey, if you want your kid to call you "motherfucker" at every opportunity, be my guest. But I doubt that most of us do. We may not base our morality in Exodus, like the Christians do; we may feel that we reason out our morals instead of having them handed to us from on high. But in any case, I wouldn't let my hypothetical 14-year-old go see the "South Park" movie, the same way I wouldn't go buy a bottle of vodka for him. When he's older, he can make his own choices, and I'll respect his right to do so. He can choose to defy me, and sneak in, and I'll find out, and we'll have to talk about it, and he'll have to take some punishment for it. That's the way values are transmitted, it seems to me, through conflict and resolution of it.
Are the moralists hypocrites? Sure they are. We all are. Unless you're one of those whose only virtue is in claiming that you have no human virtue at all.
The problem with humanity is simply this: The hypocrites are the only ones trying.
First it was the robotic fish, built in Japan, that could only be discerned from a real fish by a careful examination of its eyes. Now it is the premature aging ("four year lifespan"?) of replicant sheep.
Certainly no one thought Philip K. Dick's novel was meant to be an accurate predictor of the future, and yet it's becoming more and more like the Bible of the 21st century. The real question is: Were the images of Dick (and Ridley Scott) accurate predictions of the future, or did those images play some role in creating the reality they predicted?
It seems to me that if we grant the idea that images of the future tend to construct the future, then we've got a pretty nasty road ahead. I can think of a lot more dystopian sci-fi images than hopeful, positive ones.
I'm probably too late to the thread to post anything anyone will read, but, when you've got something to say, sometimes you gotta say it anyway.
David Foster Wallace has a great essay on the idea of special effects porn, which completely describes the Matrix.
How have special effects movies become like porn? Just subsitute F/X for intercourse. The plot is almost non-existant, and is only there to provide a sort of mental scaffolding on which to hang these sensuous, explosive payoff scenes -- the only reason you really go to see the movie in the first place.
Wallace says special effects porn started with Terminator 2, but I say it goes at least as far back as Disney's awful awful Tron, which was, in its own way, quite visually exciting. This movie is merely Tron v. 2.0 , updated with all the latest special effects patches. Unfortunately, the plot of the new version, like most new versions of software, is radically expanded without providing any new utility.
It's darn fun to watch -- it's porn, ain't it? -- but afterward, you might wonder what's wrong with the world, and why you're stuck with masturbation instead of a real relationship.
I believe the statement here is that the major advertisers, who *want* to be the bearers of the lowest common denominator, have been dumbed down enough by their own hype that they don't even have the foresight to see what will be popular with the masses.
I guess I would disagree with you here in that I don't think it was Richie's intention to make any statement at all, or more accurately, that any "statement" he was making was only an afterthought brought on by the act of product placement itself.
That's part of what I resent about the the intrusion of commerciality into the actual scenery of movies -- it erodes control of the movie's thematic space. Advertising constantly struggles to supplant content. That is its very nature -- to mimic content in order to trick you into receiving its message. To be more blunt, advertising sucks. It sucks meaning out of symbols.
Lemme ask you... after Darth Vader did the Energizer Bunny ads, how did you feel? Was he a cooler character because of it, or less? Did you feel cheated? Maybe not. I did. Not at first, though. It was later, when I watched ESB Special Edition that I realized Darth had sold out some part of himself... that his final scenes with Luke no longer had the same dramatic power because I was looking around for the Energizer Bunny. Such is the power of the Dark Side.
Let's go with the paranoid conspiracy theory, though. Let's say that the products in the movie were paid placement by the real companies. If I could get a company to pay for me to make fun of them in front of millions of viewers, I'd be laughing my butt off. Sure, they would get real advertising, if the common person can't separate the irony. But it would just go to show that the corporations don't even care if they are made fun of, as long as they get their message out.
There's no paranoia here. Advertising will supplant content anywhere it can because advertising pays and content doesn't. The question of who's scamming who when you sell advertising to "make fun" of the advertisers seems like a pretty easy one to me. You're absolutely right in that corporations don't care if they're made fun of as long as they get their message out. Why should they? Advertising simply works. Funny or not.
I know I wasn't looking desperately for easy cheese or KFC after the movie. (ooops. . . I just mentioned the two products. I guess that means they are paying me for this comment. I wish!)
Actually, that's the really funny thing about advertising. They aren't paying you to make that comment. But word of mouth is one of the primary aims of advertising. When advertising increases awareness of a product, it has done its job. Even as we sit here writing about KFC and Easy Cheese, advertising is quietly, neatly using us to take over the world. .
Don't get me wrong. Advertising isn't evil. I even like Easy Cheese and get the occasional Crispy Strip meal from KFC myself. It's the scale and pervasiveness of advertising that gets to me.
I wasn't kidding when I said that books will have advertisements in them soon. Why not? There's lots of space in the inside cover. What if it brought you a cheaper book? From there, it's only short hop to the future, where Holden Caulfield will be drinking Surge and Huck Finn will bemoan the use of his last Stridex pad as he floats down the river with Jim.
Katz didn't mention what I found the most disturbing aspect of EDtv -- the blinding barrage of product placements and advertising.
Most of it is supposed to be diegetic to the film. EDtv is ostensibly supported by a bar of advertising that takes up the bottom fifth of the screen. A gimmick is that, as his show becomes more popular, the advertisers increase in stature from local pizza parlors and the like, to multinational corporations like Pepsi, Maytag, and Nokia.
But here's the thing: These are all real advertisements. (Duh.) There is more advertising in this 2 hour film than in, jesus, perhaps 48 hours of regular TV! Every time they cut to EDtv, there is another advertiser, and they cut to it long and often. I can't determine what the director expects me to feel when he does this -- am I supposed to not notice that I'm being advertised to? Supposed to enjoy it as part of the story? I think it all comes down to the fact that he knows he's got a captive audience, and doesn't give a shit what I think.
Ron Howard has also taken product placement to new heights. In one particularly loathsome and egregious sequence, the ED family is shown eating dinner. In one shot we see the proudly displayed logos of at least half a dozen buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken (hungry rascals), several liters of Mountain Dew, a box of Ritz crackers, a cannister of Easy Cheese, and beyond that I simply lost count as the items proceeded straight past my mental defenses into my subconscious.
It's a strange, sad thing to realize that I'm part of the last generation who grew up with the movie theater as an advertising-free zone.
It ain't getting any better. It's fine if directors want to use products and diegetic advertising in films to increase their budgets . . . but I shouldn't have to pay the same amount to see a film loaded with ads as I would to see one without. Hell, they should have paid me, and the rest of the audience, for the privilege of advertising to us.
So here's your warning: EDtv is bland and weak. It does make the Truman Show seem bold and brave, and if you've seen the Truman Show, that's saying a lot. Let Opie rot in hell.
Read a book, instead.
It's probably your last chance to do so before they have advertisements.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you help me out?
Message begins:
Hey Chris --
I remember you posting about the Mindpixel project several years back on the comp.ai.* hierarchy, before it was called the Mindpixel project, back when you were first attempting to build the Corpus.
(For those of you just jumping in here, I'll quote from Chris' website:
The brilliant part (IMHO) of what Chris has described is his method of determining whether or not a system is, in fact, conscious, called the Minimum Intelligent Signal Test, or MIST. Where the Turing Test is completely subjective, the MIST is objective. It uses a series of binary (yes/no) questions to establish a threshhold for human-level cognition. With it, any system can be tested and rated based on its deviation from chance (50%).
So, as I remember you were flamed pretty hard at the time by the comp.ai.* yokels. Not that THAT means anything; they hate EVERYONE. But there were a few trenchant critiques there that I don't remember you answering adequately.
The big one that sticks out in my mind is the following: For your corpus, there seems to be some small problem regarding certain types of binary questions. For instance, those questions which depend having more data about the situation to provide the correct answer (i.e. "Is P-e4 a good move?") or can meaningfully be answered either way ("Are human beings often blue?"). Your response was that ambiguous questions like these will be eliminated from the Corpus, but some might say that you are solving the problem of intelligence by eliminating the intelligent questions. Can your Corpus function as successful training data and create a system approximating our own level of cognition when it encapsulates such a narrow slice of human intelligence?
(My own idea was that the MIST needed to be expanded from a binary to a quaternary model so that it could reflect the knowledge that some questions can be answered both ways, and some questions simply don't make sense. Call it the "yes/no/both/huh" variant.)
Also, I seem to recall some criticism based on information theory grounds; the idea that even with billions of these buggers, you still won't have enough to do anything meaningful with.
Care to update us? I found your work fascinating the last time, and am glad to see you continuing it.
There's two points worth making here.
1) I think, if we view people like packets, part of the "protocol" has to include free speech, free access to information, and the right to travel. For all people. Without these three things, a network like this cannot work. So out-and-out slavery would be against the protocol.
2) As far as it goes, I'd rather have small isolated patches of people doing things I personally disagree with, than a one-world state in which those things I consider moral wrongs are forced on 6 billion people at once.
It really depends on whether your perfect idea of the world is one where you govern everybody because you're the only one who knows what's right, or whether you believe everyone should have the freedom to govern themselves.
The idea of a one-human-being government is something interesting, at least to consider. However, it seems to ignore the whole point of government in the first place, which is to make it easier for us all to work and live together. If everyone's a sovereign state, then we're likely to be at war with one another constantly.
Assuming you meant something broader than that, we're left with the question, "Who's idea of individual rights do we get?" Abortion is a good example. Let's say you think the right to choose is an individual right that should be protected. And again, 51% of polite society agrees with you.
However, the other 49% think that the fetus is the one with the individual rights that should be protected, and to them, you're the villain.
The way it is here, no matter what solution we decide, at least 49% of our population is being denied what they see as a fundamental right.
I think people can legitimately differ on areas of moral controversy like this. In my world of node-states, abortion is practiced in 49% of them, and against the law in the other 51%. Those people who don't like the node they're in have two options: They can try to change it (and again, it's much more realistic to imagine changing the minds of the small population of your node than to acquire the resources and clout to change the minds of the Supreme Court), or they can move to one that already agrees with them.
I know this is a radical idea, but the Internet was once, too. The Node-State is just a refinement of how we can best achieve justice and freedom as we all live together. It might be thought of as the next step in a chain of thought that stems from the Code of Hammurabi to the Magna Carta to the Constitution. I think technology could allow us to do away with our bloated representative democracy and replace it with an even better system, one that's truer to those ideals of justice and freedom, one that doesn't oppress through bigness.
I can imagine the "protocols" for commerce being hammered out like nearly any open-source project, perhaps somewhat like a game of Nomic, if you've ever read any Douglas Hofstadter books. And in many ways, this idea is really just an update of the original idea of the United States as a nation in which the power resided in individual states instead of a strong federal government.
Try to imagine the world 100 years in the future. For me, it seems as if we'll either all be under the bureaucratic thumb of a giant world government (which may mean all the best for us, but will still be unjust by virtue of its bigness), or we could divest these governments and corporations of their power and give it back to small, unified groups of people.
I'm all for the second. How 'bout you?
You know, whenever anyone talks about the future myriad combinations of Internet and government, we always seem to get the most obvious, uninventive predictions. "File your taxes online! Vote online! Go to the DMV online!" Faster methods of doing things exactly the same way we do them right now.
Isn't anyone else out there thinking that maybe this kind of technology has the ability to change the way we think of government itself?
For instance, I wonder to myself sometimes if there isn't a new way to model the political boundaries of the world along the lines of the Internet. Here's a vision: A world where small individual node-states conduct commerce with each other by following universally agreed upon protocols, but remain largely autonomous internally. In much the same way as it doesn't matter whether or not you hook up a Mac, Wintel, or Linux box to the net as long as you send and recieve packets the way you're supposed to, couldn't we imagine a world where these little node-states allowed people the maximum amount of freedom to live the way they wanted as long as they followed agreed-upon procedures for routing goods and people through them?
I imagine a patchwork quilt of different autonomous mini-states, like websites, each where the people living there determine their own rules. True freedom requires exactly this kind of diversity.
As the world's population gets larger and more interconnected, it's crucial to note: Democracies become less virtuous as they become large, and any sufficiently large democracy is indistinguishible from tyranny. Don't believe me? All right, here's an analogy.
Let's say we all want to go out to dinner. All 100 of us. 49 of us happen to be vegetarians.
At Restaurant X, the procedure is simple. There's one big table, and one waitron. We all go, sit down, look at the menu and vote. Everyone eats what the majority decides. Unfortunately, 51% of us wanted the Filet Mignon (which we heard was quite good here). This leaves 49% of us without anything to eat. Democracy isn't always so tasty after all.
But at Restaurant Y, they have 10 tables. You still have to vote at each table, and the majority still determines what everybody eats, but now we have 99% of our party happy: 5 tables of 10 meat-eaters, 4 tables of 10 vegetarians, and one table with 9 happy vegetarians and 1 meat-eater who doesn't get to eat what he wants. Maybe he'll ask if he can pull a chair up to the table behind him?
Extrapolate this meat-and-veggie conflict to more contentious issues like abortion (or even IP laws) and it's easy to see how democracies are only virtuous when they're small.
So how big is a node-state? I live in the U.S., and as a practical test-case, I'm going to say county-sized. I think the modern county has the approximate amount of people that the Founders based our ideal of democracy on. But in all honesty, I think science and technology could help determine what the proper size for a semi-autonomous unit of governance should be. It's not impossible to model, and the idea seems exciting to me.
In any case, I find myself excited and curious: how can the technologies we have enable us to envision new ideas of government, in which we can all live freer lives? Any thoughts the ideas I've mentioned are appreciated, too.
Part of the point, though, is that being against one instance of technology does not make you a Luddite. You can't generalize from that.
Some people are against handguns. They're not Luddites. In a similar way, being against a certain Internet technology (say, cookies) doesn't make you a Luddite.
These days, the word functions less as an insightful label than an epithet. It's just a chestnut that's thrown out to shut people up. So when I hear it, my ears prick up. Very rarely is it used with any utility.
I like your Extension of Godwin's Law, tho.
Golias said:
"Labelling others may be an overused rhetorical tool, but sometimes it's valid. You don't always automatically lose the argument just because you call somebody a Luddite, Communist, Isolationist, Zealot, or even Katz's favorite, 'Corporatist'. Sometimes the label fits."
Of course, if someone IS a Communist, or a Luddite, or whatever, it's not only valid but good to call them what they are.
The point is that lots of labels are used to dismiss someone instead of evaluate their argument. Katz's "neo-Luddite" rag this time around is a good example. Just because you might think someone's conception of a certain technology is ill thought out doesn't mean you want to destroy all machinery and live in a pre-Industrial Revolution utopia.
It's freaky to me how hard it is to dialogue on tech issues with some people. Give one example of why one technology might have unwelcome consequences and they assume you're living in a shack in Montana.
I sticks by what I said. First person to call the other guy a Luddite without examining his argument loses.
I've had some really great experiences in lines! Like the line for the first showing of the Phantom Menace, which was a better experience than the movie itself. Or the times I've camped out waiting for concert tickets to go on sale. Even when I recently had to go in to contest some parking tickets ("Hey! More of my car was parked out of the No Parking Zone than in it!") I ended up sitting in a waiting room with a lot of other really interesting people who I'd never have met otherwise, and really got a sense of my community that I didn't have before.
Lines aren't necessarily bad. I would say a future of NO lines would be a lot worse. Like we don't sit at home and play Quake enough as it is!
Also: I think it's a rather hackeyed line to say that anyone who casts a critical eye on where a given technology takes us is a "neo-Luddite". It's lazy, and it isn't even true. From here on in, I'm establishing Crash's Corollary : When someone participating in a tech discussion refers to the opposing side as Luddites (or any variation thereof) without examining the issues raised by them, the argument is ended in favor of the opposing side.
What's wrong with Radio Shack sponsoring a trip to the Moon? Why nothing at all, you lousy communists out there. And there's nothing wrong with using lasers to turn the Moon into a giant Pepsi symbol, either. That's just good old fashioned capitalism, you hippies! If you ever worked a day in your life, you'd know that! And if Coca-Cola wants to distribute star maps to schools where Ursa Major is now labelled as "The Coca-Cola Polar Bear", well, we've got kids looking at the stars, don't we? Isn't that good enough, you lousy stinking beatniks?
Up with capitalism! Down with beatniks!
I vote that the National Academy of Arts and Sciences auctions off the right to the names in the Periodic Table of the Elements. What's the difference whether it's called Mercury or AOLium? Not a lick, you heathens. No difference at all.
Get with the program, or get the hell out of the way. Understand?
... a giant Lego brick, so big it could be seen from space. Take that, Great Wall of China! My personal preference is for a red one.
I'm sure zillions of people are going to say this, but your best bet in anime is to check out Hayao Miyazaki's work, such as Kiki's Delivery Service, Totoro, Porco Rosso (The Crimson Pig), and Laputa (Castle In The Sky). Princess Mononoke, too, if you haven't seen that in theaters already.
The best parts of Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli films (his studio) aren't just the characters, but the rich, full, colorful, vibrant worlds he puts them in. Also, he's famous for his sweeping flying scenes. I just watched a fansub of the Crimson Pig the other day, and was just blown away. We've become so reliant on computers for effects, we've lost the appreciation for what human beings can do by hand without them. Just amazing. Do a web search for Hayao Miyazaki, and you won't go wrong.
Oh, and check out Hotaru no haka (Grave of the Fireflies) while you're at it. It's not, strictly speaking, a Miyazaki film, but it's a Studio Ghibli release with his fingerprints all over it. It's a shame there are so few Ghibli movies. What I want to know from everyone else out there is: What else lives up to the Studio Ghibli standard?
Two words make my ears prick up when I see them in any piece of technology journalism: "impossible" and "inevitable". When either shows up (like the latter did here), I know the writer is in the grips of an ideology and is no longer trustworthy as a reporter. Both words represent an extremist position where there is no room for dialogue (or any change at all!) and are only meant to polarize people into groups.
Think more before you use these words, Jon. Better yet, don't use them at all.
Ray at one point talked about how the age of biological evolution is over, how technological evolution had simply taken its place. Biological humanity would wither on the vine, he predicted, replaced in the long term by our superior robot progeny. He loved this. He's not alone, either. Nearly every major AI researcher I've read about (think Hans Moravec or Rodney Brooks) has echoed similar sentiments.
Personally, the techno-rapturists frighten me much more than the non-techno-rapturists. They frighen me the way all apocalyptics frighten me, but the difference is that the techno-rapturists have the power to make their prophecies real.
So, to that end: What about you? Is it all over for humanity? Will machines infiltrate more and more of our bodies and society until humanity itself no longer exists? And do you think this is a good thing?
I'm one of the folks who read Slashdot quite often, but who don't define themselves as "geeks". There's a reason why.
When I was young, sent to the library each day at noon to plunk away on an Apple ][ because they didn't have a reading group I fit in, the isolation I felt didn't really contain any social power. Computers were necessary tools. Not "cool", by any means. At least, not to others. By and large, there wasn't much you could impress Joe Average with. In fifth grade, being a wiz at even the newest videogames (Swashbuckler, anyone?) wasn't anything compared to being good at kickball on the playground. Being a geek meant you had little to no social power.
How times have changed!
Computers are good for everything now. Computers are cool! And being good at, say, creating images with Photoshop or 3DMax, or music with FastTracker 2 or your own MIDI setup, or setting up your own netbox with Linux -- these things are tremendously cool in the eyes of almost anybody. The tables have turned. It's now the idiot kid who ISN'T on the Internet that's made to feel ostracized.
And just as when Jocks held the lion's share of social power, and used it to shame and ridicule others, Geeks have proven themselves no more virtuous. Geeks present their standard -- technical knowledge -- as the only one worth being judged by, just like Jocks of the past used their standard of physical prowess.
And judge they do! Far more harshly, I think, than most Jocks ever did. I can hear the Jock Horror stories echoing up from Slashdot's depths, but the fact remains that the psychic trauma of being shoved into a locker as an anonymous body will nearly always pale in comparison to being scrutinized and evaluated for your intellectual merits -- being ridiculed for who you are on the inside -- and found wanting.
Or to say it another way: Geeks are fucking brutal. And what's worse? They're taking over. The world is rapidly becoming less and less comprehensible to Joe Average, and the Geeks don't see anything wrong with that. "It's MY turn NOW!", or so the feeling goes. And so we're left in a world being dominated by those who nurse wounds inflicted upon them ages ago; those who prefer the digital communiques of Quake clan members to switching off the box and finding a girl to dance with. We're left in a world ruled by those who carry the deepest grudge against it, and have the power to make payback hurt.
I think, on the very deepest level, many Geeks hate being human beings. They look back on the social awkwardness they experienced in the past and say, "If this pain is what it means to be human, then fuck being human. Flood me with nanotech. Replace my neurons with processors. Make me into something else. Because I don't want to be what I am now."
What a terrifying state for the world to be in. It terrifies me, at any rate.
Admittedly, this is all rather broad, and I think I share a common history with many of the people who are aching to rise up in flames right now. (Assuming this post isn't too late to actually be seen.) There are geekish aspects to me, too. But I still want to be a human being. I want to be sociable rather than knowledgable. I like people! I like being around them, finding out about them, smoking with them, drinking with them, and I don't want my body flooded with nanotech. No future world of quantum-computer-powered star radiation analyzation digital epiphanies will ever compare to being kissed on the lips by a girl you are so damned in love with.
If Geeks could only learn to love and treasure other people once more, the way they longed for the companionship of others as kids, I think I'd be proud to call myself one.
Until then, I'm just an average person.
And that, despite what you might think, is a wonderful, wonderful feeling.
"It may be a question whether machinery does not encumber... whether we have not lost, by refinement, some energy, some vigor of wild virtue. The harm of the improved machinery may compensate its good." Not the Unabomber. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self Reliance."
I'll be the first to admit, the first time I saw "South Park" on Comedy Central, I laughed out loud. The juxtaposition of kindergarten construction-paper aesthetics with graphic sexual content was pretty damn funny for the first couple shows. Hilarious, even.
But Jon Katz's übermorality schtick is really grating on me, here.
I'm always disgusted when ideologues use the protection of children as an excuse to rape the rights and privileges of adults. (2nd Amendment rights come to mind as a primary example, here.)
I am *equally* disgusted, however, when ideologues (like Jon Katz) promote children as some bizarre sort of breed of "adults from the future"; as beings who exist on a higher intellectual plane than their parents, and should therefore be immune to the backward rules that we primitives would foist upon them.
Both attitudes come from exactly the same mentality; the ultra-glorification of childhood. Both sets of ideologues believe in their shriveled bleeding hearts that adolescents are so perfect and precious that their well-being supersedes that of the adult society they exist in.
But what always is neglected in these conversations is that these adolescents *become* the adult society at some point. You don't protect children by denying adults certain rational rights -- such as gun ownership -- because the damage you do to their future society outweighs the damage you protect them from.
Conversely, adolescents are not miniature adults. Childhood, adolescence, and even teenage years are still primarily formative ones. Jon Katz practically guffaws at the the idea that children are different in any fundamental ways than adults: "...as if any exposure to graphic language and scatological humor will damage the fragile young," he says. The-Geeks-vs.-The-Moralists. Well, hell! Why not shoot some smack in front of your kids, then? As if any exposure to illicit narcotic usage will damage the fragile young. Why not invite them to an orgy? They know what sex is, don't they? While were at it, let's add some shiny, happy incest, too! There's no reason it should be wrong for a father to fuck his 10-year-old daughter, right, Jon? As if it could damage her! Ha! How truly ludicrous! Those goddamned moralists. Always telling you and me what to do.
My point is that we *all* have some morality, and we all foist it upon others. It's perfectly reasonable to see the "South Park" movie as a vehicle of another morality. It's actually unreasonable not to.
And I wonder how much those of us who have children now, or plan to someday, would like to teach the morality of "South Park" to our kids. Hey, if you want your kid to call you "motherfucker" at every opportunity, be my guest. But I doubt that most of us do. We may not base our morality in Exodus, like the Christians do; we may feel that we reason out our morals instead of having them handed to us from on high. But in any case, I wouldn't let my hypothetical 14-year-old go see the "South Park" movie, the same way I wouldn't go buy a bottle of vodka for him. When he's older, he can make his own choices, and I'll respect his right to do so. He can choose to defy me, and sneak in, and I'll find out, and we'll have to talk about it, and he'll have to take some punishment for it. That's the way values are transmitted, it seems to me, through conflict and resolution of it.
Are the moralists hypocrites? Sure they are. We all are. Unless you're one of those whose only virtue is in claiming that you have no human virtue at all.
The problem with humanity is simply this: The hypocrites are the only ones trying.
Certainly no one thought Philip K. Dick's novel was meant to be an accurate predictor of the future, and yet it's becoming more and more like the Bible of the 21st century. The real question is: Were the images of Dick (and Ridley Scott) accurate predictions of the future, or did those images play some role in creating the reality they predicted?
It seems to me that if we grant the idea that images of the future tend to construct the future, then we've got a pretty nasty road ahead. I can think of a lot more dystopian sci-fi images than hopeful, positive ones.
I'm probably too late to the thread to post anything anyone will read, but, when you've got something to say, sometimes you gotta say it anyway.
David Foster Wallace has a great essay on the idea of special effects porn, which completely describes the Matrix.
How have special effects movies become like porn? Just subsitute F/X for intercourse. The plot is almost non-existant, and is only there to provide a sort of mental scaffolding on which to hang these sensuous, explosive payoff scenes -- the only reason you really go to see the movie in the first place.
Wallace says special effects porn started with Terminator 2, but I say it goes at least as far back as Disney's awful awful Tron, which was, in its own way, quite visually exciting. This movie is merely Tron v. 2.0 , updated with all the latest special effects patches. Unfortunately, the plot of the new version, like most new versions of software, is radically expanded without providing any new utility.
It's darn fun to watch -- it's porn, ain't it? -- but afterward, you might wonder what's wrong with the world, and why you're stuck with masturbation instead of a real relationship.
I believe the statement here is that the major advertisers, who *want* to be the bearers of the lowest common denominator, have been dumbed down enough by their own hype that they don't even have the foresight to see what will be popular with the masses.
I guess I would disagree with you here in that I don't think it was Richie's intention to make any statement at all, or more accurately, that any "statement" he was making was only an afterthought brought on by the act of product placement itself.
That's part of what I resent about the the intrusion of commerciality into the actual scenery of movies -- it erodes control of the movie's thematic space. Advertising constantly struggles to supplant content. That is its very nature -- to mimic content in order to trick you into receiving its message. To be more blunt, advertising sucks. It sucks meaning out of symbols.
Lemme ask you... after Darth Vader did the Energizer Bunny ads, how did you feel? Was he a cooler character because of it, or less? Did you feel cheated? Maybe not. I did. Not at first, though. It was later, when I watched ESB Special Edition that I realized Darth had sold out some part of himself... that his final scenes with Luke no longer had the same dramatic power because I was looking around for the Energizer Bunny. Such is the power of the Dark Side.
Let's go with the paranoid conspiracy theory, though. Let's say that the products in the movie were paid placement by the real companies. If I could get a company to pay for me to make fun of them in front of millions of viewers, I'd be laughing my butt off. Sure, they would get real advertising, if the common person can't separate the irony. But it would just go to show that the corporations don't even care if they are made fun of, as long as they get their message out.
There's no paranoia here. Advertising will supplant content anywhere it can because advertising pays and content doesn't. The question of who's scamming who when you sell advertising to "make fun" of the advertisers seems like a pretty easy one to me. You're absolutely right in that corporations don't care if they're made fun of as long as they get their message out. Why should they? Advertising simply works. Funny or not.
I know I wasn't looking desperately for easy cheese or KFC after the movie. (ooops. . . I just mentioned the two products. I guess that means they are paying me for this comment. I wish!)
Actually, that's the really funny thing about advertising. They aren't paying you to make that comment. But word of mouth is one of the primary aims of advertising. When advertising increases awareness of a product, it has done its job. Even as we sit here writing about KFC and Easy Cheese, advertising is quietly, neatly using us to take over the world. .
Don't get me wrong. Advertising isn't evil. I even like Easy Cheese and get the occasional Crispy Strip meal from KFC myself. It's the scale and pervasiveness of advertising that gets to me.
I wasn't kidding when I said that books will have advertisements in them soon. Why not? There's lots of space in the inside cover. What if it brought you a cheaper book? From there, it's only short hop to the future, where Holden Caulfield will be drinking Surge and Huck Finn will bemoan the use of his last Stridex pad as he floats down the river with Jim.
And whatever could be wrong with that?
Katz didn't mention what I found the most disturbing aspect of EDtv -- the blinding barrage of product placements and advertising.
Most of it is supposed to be diegetic to the film. EDtv is ostensibly supported by a bar of advertising that takes up the bottom fifth of the screen. A gimmick is that, as his show becomes more popular, the advertisers increase in stature from local pizza parlors and the like, to multinational corporations like Pepsi, Maytag, and Nokia.
But here's the thing: These are all real advertisements. (Duh.) There is more advertising in this 2 hour film than in, jesus, perhaps 48 hours of regular TV! Every time they cut to EDtv, there is another advertiser, and they cut to it long and often. I can't determine what the director expects me to feel when he does this -- am I supposed to not notice that I'm being advertised to? Supposed to enjoy it as part of the story? I think it all comes down to the fact that he knows he's got a captive audience, and doesn't give a shit what I think.
Ron Howard has also taken product placement to new heights. In one particularly loathsome and egregious sequence, the ED family is shown eating dinner. In one shot we see the proudly displayed logos of at least half a dozen buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken (hungry rascals), several liters of Mountain Dew, a box of Ritz crackers, a cannister of Easy Cheese, and beyond that I simply lost count as the items proceeded straight past my mental defenses into my subconscious.
It's a strange, sad thing to realize that I'm part of the last generation who grew up with the movie theater as an advertising-free zone.
It ain't getting any better. It's fine if directors want to use products and diegetic advertising in films to increase their budgets . . . but I shouldn't have to pay the same amount to see a film loaded with ads as I would to see one without. Hell, they should have paid me, and the rest of the audience, for the privilege of advertising to us.
So here's your warning: EDtv is bland and weak. It does make the Truman Show seem bold and brave, and if you've seen the Truman Show, that's saying a lot. Let Opie rot in hell.
Read a book, instead.
It's probably your last chance to do so before they have advertisements.