This request brings to mind the now famous quote from Ray Ozzie regarding reorienting Microsoft to services: "Complexity kills".
There is actually a rigorous definition of complexity that is actually stated in terms of software: Kolmogorov complexity. Kolmogorov complexity is the size of the shortest program that produces, precisely, a given output. The number of bits in that program is the Kolmogorov complexity of the output. This is actually a very useful way of viewing system complexity in the case of software. One way of viewing programming is the compression of all the program's use cases into a program specification which, in theory, is executable. But there is more to it. As it happens -- unsurprising to many of us -- it is now a theorem of computer science that the closer the size of that "executable" gets to the Kolmogorov complexity of the use cases, the better.
This theorem is a major breakthrough in CS and should be learned in every institute purporting to teach IT.
It's important enough that I've proposed a prize award to Ray Ozzie. What follows is my email to him. We'll see if it makes it through his gatekeepers and then gets his attention.
Hi Ray,
I've got a simple and powerful idea that I think, based on your statement "Complexity kills," you'll find interesting.
It is a prize competition that I'm tentatively calling "The C-Prize" that rewards the most succinct representation of a major knowledge base.
Unsurprizingly to some of us, Ockham's Razor is more than a mere rule of thumb -- it turns out to be the foundation of intelligence. Marcus Hutter of the University of Lugano, Switzerland, recently provided a mathematical proof of this link between simplicity and intelligence which has withstood peer review. Dr. Hutter believes the C-Prize to be "an excellent idea".
The criterion is easy enough to state:
Let anyone submit a program that produces, with no inputs, one of the major natural language corpora (such as a Wikipedia snapshot) as output.
S = size of uncompressed corpus P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus R = S/P (the compression ratio).
Award monies:
Previous record ratio: R0 New record ratio: R1=R0+X Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))
The compression program and decompression program are made open source.
At present there is a small prize being administered by Leonid A. Broukhis based on the relatively tiny Calgary Corpus. Matthew Mahoney of the University of Miami has proposed a larger $50,000 compression prize to the National Science Foundation, but experience has shown it is like pulling teeth to get government agencies to fund prize awards -- they generally have to see private parties are doing so first. Marcus Hutter has put up a few small prizes based on some mathematics problems he needs solved for advancement of his theory of intelligence.
Any of these individuals could be a credible locus of control for the C-Prize -- or Microsoft itself could be the locus of control.
Imagine a drug that could obviate post traumatic stress disorder and Arthur Janov's Primal Therapy. Then imagine a drug that could reduce the emotional impact of sermons about Hell you've heard or of movies you've seen -- movies like "Deliverance" or "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind". It has a name and it's "propranolol".
Even assuming AI were to develop the equivalent of genetic self-interest, (something that would take a long time even if humans turned them lose to reproduce without us selecting them appropriately) I'd much rather be in competition with a species that had the potential of being symbiotic due to having a different ecological nich. If it gets to the point that the solar output (forget the sun falling on Earth here -- that's too insignificant to consider important to a silicon based life form) is the limited resource, I suspect that the nich humans will fill will be orders of magnitude larger than they now fill on earth.
The best hope humans have of the transhumanist wishful thinking is to develop superhuman AIs that find utilizing the gas giants to their advantage given the limited supply of silicon. Humans, as the highest form of organic intelligence, would be the natural species to transit to higher intelligence.
Maybe the super AI's could get around this by using a straight carbon semiconductor form of intelligence or something but there is more going on in our brains than we understand. For example, I suspect there is a lot more quantum logic going on within our brains than currently thought by cognitive scientists and neurologists. It only makes sense evolution would have exploited every angle of the physics of the universe to create intelligence. My point in bringing in the possibility of quantum logic is that there are really many things we don't know about natural systems of high complexity and I suspect the same will apply even to super AI's. The fact that we might have the laws down cold at the quantum level doesn't mean we know how things operate in the higher complexity systems.
Human brains are very valuable repositories of ancient wisdom about the universe and the most optimal thing for the super AIs to do -- at least for a while -- would be to transhumanize our brains for us.
Moreover, if it is ok to pass laws to prevent the creation of intelligences greater than our own, why isn't it ok to pass laws dumbing down the smartest among us?
The self-determination argument applied to humanity as a whole -- striving to maintain control of its own destiny by preventing the creation of higher non-human intelligences -- applies also to people who want to maintain control of their own destiny against those smarter than themselves.
Personally I'm much more frightened of unenlightened self-interest than I am enlightened self-interest.
I really wish it were possible to make some of the "smart" people who are really good at grabbing control of resources intelligent enough to understand that they are using those resources in very stupid, self-destructive ways.
Indeed, it is this abysmal stupidity among the shrewdest among us that is my main motivation for promoting super AI.
If NASA is going to do "Apollo II: The Orion Project", the least they can do is open up the competition by permitting a wider array of US companies to make nuclear rockets, and then purchasing launch services from the resulting nuclear rocket orbital launch services industry.
I thought that Griffin "got it". Now I'm not so sure.
Since Itanium's team doesn't have a monopoly, as you point out, it may be they'll have sufficient motivation to make it work correctly enough to compete.
We may yet see an Itanium that competes but I'm not holding my breath for Vista.
The same thing has happened to Microsoft with Windows Vista that has happened to the Itanium project:
Whenever you set out to reengineer a foundation, and you throw money at it in the form of more engineers, you are asking for long delays if not outright failure.
When presented, the non-mainstream viewpoints are are routinely presented from the perspective of the mainstream viewpoint. This is accomplished by burdening them with "criticisms" not burdening the presentation of the mainstream viewpoint to nearly the same degree.
The ideal is _not_ "neutrality". It is a bald-faced lie to call it that as virtually admitted by the policy on forking. Calling the ideal "mainstream viewpoint" isn't an indictment -- it is a valid ideal to accurately portray the mainstream viewpoint and stating it in those terms is honesty.
My point was not that the Evolution article was an example of abuse of the NPOV myth -- clearly there is no article titled "The Pseudoscience of Creationism" -- it is that were the Creationists to capture the mainstream they might well be able to get put into place an article titled "Satanic ideas about creation" and have it stick.
The trick seems to be the following:
When someone forks an article to discuss objectively a point of view to which the mainstream is morally hostile, the mainstream invokes the anti-forking policy I quoted so as to delete the article. Then when they decide they want to fork an article with their own title/spin etc. they justify it with another "NPOV policy" that permits the creation of articles "describing minority points of view".
Call it "mainstream point of view" or better yet "Wikipedian point of view". Not all of us have the time and motivation to spend out lives fighting political battles over Wikipedia articles.
Content forking:
The generally accepted policy is that all facts and majority Points of View on a certain subject are treated in one article.
This is where the NPOV weasels get to put the kabosh on ideas they don't like.
The idea that you can provide a "neutral" point of view is simply fallacious. Even the Wikipedia NPOV policy admits that there is a point of view and it is whatever is "mainstream". By Wikipedia's standard, the "mainstream" viewpoint could be creationism and evolution the spawn of satan, and the article on "evolution" would be named "Satanic ideas about creation".
I was around reading the debates when E. O. Wilson was being harrangued attacked by guys like Lewontin and Gould. Please tell me where E. O. Wilson said of humans anything like "its all in the genes" so as to qualify him for the epithet "genetic determinist" leveled at him by your heroes?
And "we're all related" to the human immuno deficiency virus. The most recent common ancestor argument is better but still highly misleading. The fact is that anyone with half a brain knows that the intended effect of statement's like the idiot's and that of the article is to give the impression that all or at least most genes that distinguish humans from other animals are in a HW equilibrium because there is no population structure worth discussing except in the fevered imaginations of "genetic determinists" -- a phrase which itself is the product of the fevered imaginations of guys like Lewontin and Gould. No one, not even the white supremacist anthropologists of the 19th century nor Nazi pseudoscientists believed there were no environmental influences.
Some idiot with a PhD in molecular genetics (not population genetics) while debating me once blurted out that the human race is in a "Hardy-Wienberg Equilibrium", which is essentially the impression intended by the referenced article. What HRE means is that there is no "population structure" such as "races" -- which plays very well with the PC Feelgoodism that has been elevated to a state of theocratic dogma by the current zeigeist pervading not just media and academia but governmental circles. Of course when I pointed out that no one, not even the most politically correct academics claims such nonsense, he detonated and started telling me to blow my brains out.
This is par for the course really.
The reality is there is a lot of inbreeding among most populations -- so much so that the bugaboo of "geographic race", which is supposed to be nothing more than folk taxonomy or folksonomy, is actually one of the strongest predictors of genetic makeup medical researchers can use without going to the level of an actual DNA assay. A lot of this brain noise can be traced back to a little academic slight of hand committed by Richard Lewontin when he published a peer-reviewed paper circa 1970 that studied the population structure of certain genes. He then went on to write a book which did not pass peer review but which got a lot of publicity for the claim that "there is more variation within than between races" -- an idiom that is now part of the catechism of liberal arts academia.
Well, unfortunately, this was an appealing fallacy, as shown by one of the grand old men of population genetics, AWF Edwards in Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy published under the peer-reviewed Bioessays about 30 years after Lewontin's non-peer-reviewed popular science book posing as academic debunking of popular prejudice. Why so long before such a peer-reviewed debunking? Well, this is the clever part -- Lewontin never bothered to publish his little catechism in any peer reviewed paper so there was never any basis for answering it within academia. Edwards actually had to depart somewhat from academic convention in addressing a popular misconception posing as academic wisdom that had influenced the government and culture profoundly for an entire generation!
If you're developing an application where there are a bunch of forms and workflow spec'ed out then you take a statistical sample of the forms and get them running with the development tools you are using.
At the other extreme, if you're developing a "platform" you're in the realm of philosophy or mathematics where it matters more how well you conceptualize the system and you should probably just forget about estimates and go for quality. Yes, that means you can't go to VC's for financing deep system software.
I not only talked to Jones, I got funding mandated to Ames to fund supersonic testing of the oblique all wing design as a consequence of my conversations with him. The poor SOBs at Ames ended up getting some assholes at NASA HQ on a revenge kick by docking their discretionary budget by the amount that congress mandated. R. T. Jones told me, and I believe him, that the eliptical oblique ALL WING (read my fucking response) was proposed almost as soon as the principle of the oblique wing was discovered optimal.
If this Subcommittee hears no other message through the barrage of studies, projections and policy recommendations, it must hear this message. A reformed space policy focused on opening the space frontier through commercial incentives will make all the difference to our future as a world, a nation and as individuals.
The point of an objective is that you either achieve or you don't. There is no "try" (not to rely on Lucas/Campbell for credibility here).
Businesses use objectives all the time. Military uses objectives all the time. The reason is clear -- so you clearly see when you are making progress toward your goal.
Any businessman who can't set objectives designed to move the state of things closer to his goal must have been given his money by someone who could.
Good intentions are just that. Objective criteria for disbursing money leverages the capital and talent of others rather than creating a hierarchy of proposal writers and their beneficiaries who may or may not actually accomplish jack shit.
Saying "prize" doesn't make it objective and a "humanity prize" could mean anything.
Why is it the billionare philanthropists in the US don't finance prizes for objective criteria?
The X-Prize had an Iranian family of much lesser means providing the critical financing to put it over the top.
I mean it was fine for Paul Allen to invest in Rutan but really -- how is it these people manage to leave the role of king offering the hand of his daughter in marriage to the knight that slays the dragon to Iranians?
It is the first attempt at oblique all wing aircraft but the point is that this principle was known and advocated by R. T. Jones starting in the early 1950s, but it took this long for the dim-wits to realize that, well, maybe building the optimum craft is a good idea even if it looks funny. Even so they can't get around to it until 15 years in the future. The situation would be laughable if it weren't so tragic.
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This request brings to mind the now famous quote from Ray Ozzie regarding reorienting Microsoft to services: "Complexity kills".
There is actually a rigorous definition of complexity that is actually stated in terms of software: Kolmogorov complexity. Kolmogorov complexity is the size of the shortest program that produces, precisely, a given output. The number of bits in that program is the Kolmogorov complexity of the output. This is actually a very useful way of viewing system complexity in the case of software. One way of viewing programming is the compression of all the program's use cases into a program specification which, in theory, is executable. But there is more to it. As it happens -- unsurprising to many of us -- it is now a theorem of computer science that the closer the size of that "executable" gets to the Kolmogorov complexity of the use cases, the better.
This theorem is a major breakthrough in CS and should be learned in every institute purporting to teach IT.
It's important enough that I've proposed a prize award to Ray Ozzie. What follows is my email to him. We'll see if it makes it through his gatekeepers and then gets his attention.
Hi Ray,
I've got a simple and powerful idea that I think, based on your statement "Complexity kills," you'll find interesting.
It is a prize competition that I'm tentatively calling "The C-Prize" that rewards the most succinct representation of a major knowledge base.
Unsurprizingly to some of us, Ockham's Razor is more than a mere rule of thumb -- it turns out to be the foundation of intelligence. Marcus Hutter of the University of Lugano, Switzerland, recently provided a mathematical proof of this link between simplicity and intelligence which has withstood peer review. Dr. Hutter believes the C-Prize to be "an excellent idea".
The criterion is easy enough to state:
Let anyone submit a program that produces, with no inputs, one of the major natural language corpora (such as a Wikipedia snapshot) as output.
S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P (the compression ratio).
Award monies:
Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))
The compression program and decompression program are made open source.
At present there is a small prize being administered by Leonid A. Broukhis based on the relatively tiny Calgary Corpus. Matthew Mahoney of the University of Miami has proposed a larger $50,000 compression prize to the National Science Foundation, but experience has shown it is like pulling teeth to get government agencies to fund prize awards -- they generally have to see private parties are doing so first. Marcus Hutter has put up a few small prizes based on some mathematics problems he needs solved for advancement of his theory of intelligence.
Any of these individuals could be a credible locus of control for the C-Prize -- or Microsoft itself could be the locus of control.
Imagine a drug that could obviate post traumatic stress disorder and Arthur Janov's Primal Therapy. Then imagine a drug that could reduce the emotional impact of sermons about Hell you've heard or of movies you've seen -- movies like "Deliverance" or "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind". It has a name and it's "propranolol".
The C-Prize is the path to superhuman AI.
And as for the "threat" of superhuman AI:
Even assuming AI were to develop the equivalent of genetic self-interest, (something that would take a long time even if humans turned them lose to reproduce without us selecting them appropriately) I'd much rather be in competition with a species that had the potential of being symbiotic due to having a different ecological nich. If it gets to the point that the solar output (forget the sun falling on Earth here -- that's too insignificant to consider important to a silicon based life form) is the limited resource, I suspect that the nich humans will fill will be orders of magnitude larger than they now fill on earth.
The best hope humans have of the transhumanist wishful thinking is to develop superhuman AIs that find utilizing the gas giants to their advantage given the limited supply of silicon. Humans, as the highest form of organic intelligence, would be the natural species to transit to higher intelligence.
Maybe the super AI's could get around this by using a straight carbon semiconductor form of intelligence or something but there is more going on in our brains than we understand. For example, I suspect there is a lot more quantum logic going on within our brains than currently thought by cognitive scientists and neurologists. It only makes sense evolution would have exploited every angle of the physics of the universe to create intelligence. My point in bringing in the possibility of quantum logic is that there are really many things we don't know about natural systems of high complexity and I suspect the same will apply even to super AI's. The fact that we might have the laws down cold at the quantum level doesn't mean we know how things operate in the higher complexity systems.
Human brains are very valuable repositories of ancient wisdom about the universe and the most optimal thing for the super AIs to do -- at least for a while -- would be to transhumanize our brains for us.
Moreover, if it is ok to pass laws to prevent the creation of intelligences greater than our own, why isn't it ok to pass laws dumbing down the smartest among us?
The self-determination argument applied to humanity as a whole -- striving to maintain control of its own destiny by preventing the creation of higher non-human intelligences -- applies also to people who want to maintain control of their own destiny against those smarter than themselves.
Personally I'm much more frightened of unenlightened self-interest than I am enlightened self-interest.
I really wish it were possible to make some of the "smart" people who are really good at grabbing control of resources intelligent enough to understand that they are using those resources in very stupid, self-destructive ways.
Indeed, it is this abysmal stupidity among the shrewdest among us that is my main motivation for promoting super AI.
I thought that Griffin "got it". Now I'm not so sure.
... ah the hell with it.
We may yet see an Itanium that competes but I'm not holding my breath for Vista.
Whenever you set out to reengineer a foundation, and you throw money at it in the form of more engineers, you are asking for long delays if not outright failure.
When presented, the non-mainstream viewpoints are are routinely presented from the perspective of the mainstream viewpoint. This is accomplished by burdening them with "criticisms" not burdening the presentation of the mainstream viewpoint to nearly the same degree.
The ideal is _not_ "neutrality". It is a bald-faced lie to call it that as virtually admitted by the policy on forking. Calling the ideal "mainstream viewpoint" isn't an indictment -- it is a valid ideal to accurately portray the mainstream viewpoint and stating it in those terms is honesty.
My point was not that the Evolution article was an example of abuse of the NPOV myth -- clearly there is no article titled "The Pseudoscience of Creationism" -- it is that were the Creationists to capture the mainstream they might well be able to get put into place an article titled "Satanic ideas about creation" and have it stick. The trick seems to be the following: When someone forks an article to discuss objectively a point of view to which the mainstream is morally hostile, the mainstream invokes the anti-forking policy I quoted so as to delete the article. Then when they decide they want to fork an article with their own title/spin etc. they justify it with another "NPOV policy" that permits the creation of articles "describing minority points of view".
Call it "mainstream point of view" or better yet "Wikipedian point of view". Not all of us have the time and motivation to spend out lives fighting political battles over Wikipedia articles.
Content forking: The generally accepted policy is that all facts and majority Points of View on a certain subject are treated in one article. This is where the NPOV weasels get to put the kabosh on ideas they don't like.
The idea that you can provide a "neutral" point of view is simply fallacious. Even the Wikipedia NPOV policy admits that there is a point of view and it is whatever is "mainstream". By Wikipedia's standard, the "mainstream" viewpoint could be creationism and evolution the spawn of satan, and the article on "evolution" would be named "Satanic ideas about creation".
I was around reading the debates when E. O. Wilson was being harrangued attacked by guys like Lewontin and Gould. Please tell me where E. O. Wilson said of humans anything like "its all in the genes" so as to qualify him for the epithet "genetic determinist" leveled at him by your heroes?
And "we're all related" to the human immuno deficiency virus. The most recent common ancestor argument is better but still highly misleading. The fact is that anyone with half a brain knows that the intended effect of statement's like the idiot's and that of the article is to give the impression that all or at least most genes that distinguish humans from other animals are in a HW equilibrium because there is no population structure worth discussing except in the fevered imaginations of "genetic determinists" -- a phrase which itself is the product of the fevered imaginations of guys like Lewontin and Gould. No one, not even the white supremacist anthropologists of the 19th century nor Nazi pseudoscientists believed there were no environmental influences.
This is par for the course really.
The reality is there is a lot of inbreeding among most populations -- so much so that the bugaboo of "geographic race", which is supposed to be nothing more than folk taxonomy or folksonomy, is actually one of the strongest predictors of genetic makeup medical researchers can use without going to the level of an actual DNA assay. A lot of this brain noise can be traced back to a little academic slight of hand committed by Richard Lewontin when he published a peer-reviewed paper circa 1970 that studied the population structure of certain genes. He then went on to write a book which did not pass peer review but which got a lot of publicity for the claim that "there is more variation within than between races" -- an idiom that is now part of the catechism of liberal arts academia.
Well, unfortunately, this was an appealing fallacy, as shown by one of the grand old men of population genetics, AWF Edwards in Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy published under the peer-reviewed Bioessays about 30 years after Lewontin's non-peer-reviewed popular science book posing as academic debunking of popular prejudice. Why so long before such a peer-reviewed debunking? Well, this is the clever part -- Lewontin never bothered to publish his little catechism in any peer reviewed paper so there was never any basis for answering it within academia. Edwards actually had to depart somewhat from academic convention in addressing a popular misconception posing as academic wisdom that had influenced the government and culture profoundly for an entire generation!
At the other extreme, if you're developing a "platform" you're in the realm of philosophy or mathematics where it matters more how well you conceptualize the system and you should probably just forget about estimates and go for quality. Yes, that means you can't go to VC's for financing deep system software.
I not only talked to Jones, I got funding mandated to Ames to fund supersonic testing of the oblique all wing design as a consequence of my conversations with him. The poor SOBs at Ames ended up getting some assholes at NASA HQ on a revenge kick by docking their discretionary budget by the amount that congress mandated. R. T. Jones told me, and I believe him, that the eliptical oblique ALL WING (read my fucking response) was proposed almost as soon as the principle of the oblique wing was discovered optimal.
Right on, Mr. Griffin.
Businesses use objectives all the time. Military uses objectives all the time. The reason is clear -- so you clearly see when you are making progress toward your goal.
Any businessman who can't set objectives designed to move the state of things closer to his goal must have been given his money by someone who could.
Saying "prize" doesn't make it objective and a "humanity prize" could mean anything.
The X-Prize had an Iranian family of much lesser means providing the critical financing to put it over the top.
I mean it was fine for Paul Allen to invest in Rutan but really -- how is it these people manage to leave the role of king offering the hand of his daughter in marriage to the knight that slays the dragon to Iranians?
But some "peers" are more "peer" than others, like Mr. Levin.
Welcome to Animal Farm.
It is the first attempt at oblique all wing aircraft but the point is that this principle was known and advocated by R. T. Jones starting in the early 1950s, but it took this long for the dim-wits to realize that, well, maybe building the optimum craft is a good idea even if it looks funny. Even so they can't get around to it until 15 years in the future. The situation would be laughable if it weren't so tragic.