TinkerX

I saw Disney/Pixtar’s “WALL-E” yesterday with my son. Fun movie, excellent animation, some good laughs. A bit heavy-handed on the overarching messages about society side… but that’s Disney for ya. B+

Based on the film, I was going to write a quick post about how, apparently, in the film, singularity is achieved through waste management. Go read the Wikipedia article on “technological singularity” so I don’t have to do a crappy job summarizing here. [pause] Thanks.

Machine intelligence is a wonderful topic for when you’re hanging out waiting for a movie to start, or sitting around drinking wine coolers on the deck on a nice, early summer evening. It’s fun to discuss the differences between creativity, computation, cognition, recognition, etc. and go on about how men and machines may differ — both now and in the future — in terms of thinking-type activities.

My point, from watching WALL-E, was going to be that we equate (especially as children) emotional goals very specifically with self-awareness. You can have an animal (or a plant, a teapot, a statue, a car, etc.) in a movie be, essentially, a prop, and have no “feelings.” Or they may be rudimentary feelings that reflect back from the main characters. But for a creature to be “alive,” it needs to do thinky things that have more to do with its own well-being (usually emotional) than with sheer computing power. Thus, though WALL-E may be able to do many computational things, what makes him “thinking,” what has pushed him beyond the singularity, is his ability to formulate his own goals.

Interestingly, the “bad guy” in the movie [very minor spoiler] seems alive, too… but has received his goals as part of a program; ie, they are not his own goals, per se, but are direct instructions from a human.

That was about it for my original post idea… the thought that we base our idea (at least in a shallow, entertaining sense) on what is “real person thinking” on the ability not to solve problems, but to come up with them. To decide, “This situation isn’t ideal for me… I can envision another possibility.” Person-hood based not on survival (which requires all kinds of problem solving, and which animals do all the time), but on idealism.

That was the extent of it. But then I read a new post at Kevin Kelly’s The Technium about “The Google way of science.” The basic idea being that a new kind of cognition (or at least, though-work) is being done through super-fast evaluations of super-huge data sets. The example I like is the one about how Google provides on-the-fly Web site translation. They don’t have an translation algorithm, they just compare enormous sets of currently translated documents.

This is, as Kelly and other point out, a fantastic way to solve problems. You don’t worry about a model, you don’t worry about a theory or an equation. You just put trillions of cycles of computing power to work examining billions of data points, and then you figure out where new data points would line up.

Fascinating, important stuff, yes. But Kelly goes on to suggest that this kind of computation disproves Searle’s riddle of the Chinese room,  whereas I think it actualy *proves* Searle’s point in that thought experiment. If I had access to all the (let’s say) Chinese-to-English-and-back documents that Google does, I, too, could translate between the languages without understanding both. Maybe even neither. If you’ve ever tried Google’s spot-translation facilities and seen what it does to metaphor, you know that quite a bit of understanding is lost (ahem) in translation.

Kelly goes on to quote George Dyson in a response he (Dyson) made to an article Chris Andersen wrote in Wired on this subject:

For a long time we were stuck on the idea that the brain somehow contained a “model” of reality, and that AI would be achieved by constructing similar “models.” What’s a model? There are 2 requirements: 1) Something that works, and 2) Something we understand. Our large, distributed, petabyte-scale creations, whether GenBank or Google, are starting to grasp reality in ways that work just fine but that we don’t necessarily understand. Just as we will eventually take the brain apart, neuron by neuron, and never find the model, we will discover that true AI came into existence without ever needing a coherent model or a theory of intelligence. Reality does the job just fine.

By any reasonable definition, the “Overmind” (or Kevin’s OneComputer, or whatever) is beginning to think, though this does not mean thinking the way we do, or on any scale that we can comprehend. What Chris Anderson is hinting at is that Science (and some very successful business) will increasingly be done by people who are not only reading nature directly, but are figuring out ways to read the Overmind.

Now… I love science fiction. But I really don’t buy that dipping into enormous pools of data to look for correlations counts as any kind of “thinking” that we would recognize as being of an order even close to that of animals, to say nothing of the cute (yet not cuddly) WALL-E. Dyson himself says, “… though this does not mean thinking the way we do, or on any scale that we can comprehend.” Well… why call it “thinking” if it’s something completely different than what we call “thinking,” and on a totally different scale… Mama always said, “Life is like a box of semantics.” If I can call what the weather does “thinking” because it moves enormous numbers of things around and exacts changes and is involved in activities based on ultra-complex rules, then OK. What Google etc. does could be called “thinking,” too. If we open it up that far, though, we’ve lost the original intention of what we mean when we use the term to apply to us man-apes.

When you challenge a child who has done something stupid or dangerous and ask, “What were you thinking?” you’re not looking for an answer in terms of their problem solving abilities. If the boy-child has emptied 25 cans of shaving cream into the kiddie pool and is making “summer-time snow angels,” you may love the creative spirit, hate the waste of money (and how he smells afterward), but your chat with him afterward will be about making choices, not about air pressure and aroma. You want to know what led him to the choice to do the unwise thing, so that you can teach him not to lead himself there. You want to help him create better problems for himself, not, in many cases, solve them.

I can’t tell time anywhere near as accurately as a watch. But that doesn’t mean that a watch is thinking. Or, if want to say it is, it is only ever thinking about what time it is.

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PS: Irony of the week. The last line of dialogue in WALL-E was clipped slightly at my showing by the “pop” you get during a slightly crappy jump from one reel to another. A movie created using advanced, computerized digital effects about an advanced, computerized digital creature… partly f’d up by an analog zit. I was amused.

So I downloaded the free trial of “Spore: Creature Creator.” I’ve been drooling in anticipation of the full game of “Spore” now for… I don’t know, Will… how long? 3 years? 5? Something like that.

Anyway… played this little mini-preview game-y thing where you create creatures using one of the engines that will be in the final game. It’s fun. And my son really enjoyed it. I registered the trial online so that I could see other folks’ creations, get updates, etc. Registration, as per normal, requires an email address (cue ominous music… why would he point out an obvious bit o’ stuff like that? hmmmmm….)

The free trial of “Creature Creator” only gives you access to like 1/8th of all the pieces-parts. And my boy liked it enough that I decided to upgrade to the full version (never mind that I think this is essentially a marketing tease for the full game, now slated to come out in September, and that, IMHO, the “full version” of this little mini game should be free).

Clicking the “upgrade” button from within the game takes you to the purchase site for EA. OK…. Not exactly what I expected, as I’d already downloaded the large install file. Will they make me go through that again? I’d assumed I’d just pay and get an unlock code. A trick that 3rd-rate shareware peddlers have had perfected for years. We’ll see…

So I add the full version of the program to my cart, fill in all my info for checking out…

And get an error.

“That email address is already in use.”

Bwa? BWAAAA? The email address I gave EA as part of the registration process for a piece of trial software is already in use… Well, DUH! It’s in use by me, who registered earlier today. And now I want to upgrade… but you won’t let me, because my email address is already in use by you.

Mad stupid. Mad-5 stupid. I expected more from EA and Spore and Will and Maxis. This does not bode well…

After more than a year, JotSpot (bought by Google that long ago) has come out from behind the gCurtain and has reemerged as Google Sites.

I blogged the Google purchase of JotSpot back in November of 2006; I called it the “2nd wiki that Google bought.” Writely (the engine for Google Docs) being the first.

So… now you can use Google to create not just pages that you can view (iGoogle), but pages that you can share with everyone. Visitors can view the pages, registered users can create/edit stuff. [I’ll have a better review of the functionality after I get a Google Site up and running]

So what? So you can now use Google to search, create docs, create Web pages, share stuff, etc. etc. Nothing new here, right? These aren’t the droids you’re looking for…

Maybe they are.

I keep pointing people to this essay by George Dyson on Edge. In it, he says:

The books that have been written are easy. They represent the collective memory and imagination of mankind, and the technical resources now exist to deliver The Complete Works of Homo Sapiens, Unabridged. Who can argue against this? It is the realization of every librarian’s dream — unless you harbor suspicions about who is going to need librarians once the Universal Library has digested all the books… The Universal Library promises us a repository for the souls of all existing books — and the resurrection of all titles that have gone extinct. And the books that have not been written yet?

Emphasis mine.

The biggest library in the universe is the one of those works as yet to be written. Every year the Web sees the creation of more content than exists in the Library of Congress. I don’t want to discuss the relative value of those materials at this point. I’m just noticing that lots of people are adding lots of new stuff to “The Library” all the time.

And now Google has pushed out another service by which that content can be… manipulated? Captured? Serviced? Advertised? Searched? OK… whatever you want to call it. You can do it on Google.

So what? Some will ask. I can create a Web site on MySpace or WordPress or with a free, generic tool and a couple bucks on GoDaddy. It’s not that what Google is doing with Google Sites is particularly unique, it’s that it’s doing it in conjunction with everything else.

Creation, too, has a much bigger brand footprint than search, advertising, etc. When you create something, you put yourself into it. The Web becomes more “yours” when you create a Wikipedia entry or post a YouTube video. Or if you create a site with Google.

No prognostication on this post. Just observation. The world’s mightiest search/advertising engine is now even further into the business of creativity as well as findability. It’s the printing press for the Universal Future Library as well as the table of contents and advertiser.

I love open source stuff. Who can argue with free? And with the idea that a community of users can work on something they love and make it good and, in some cases, better than a corporate version. Good stuff. Unfortunately, sometimes the price of “free” is that you have to be an enthusiast in order to get stuff to work. And while that can be fun if you are, in fact, an enthusiast… the difference between “not worth my time” and “whoa! cool!” can be measured in frustration.

Two new services (new to me, anyway) help put the “easy” into “free.”

WinLibre bundles some of the best open source, desktop softare for Windows into one complete, customized download and install routine. You download one (pretty big… 151 MB) WinLibre setup file, choose the components you want, and BLAMO! they all get installed in one swell foop. Optional installs include Open Office, Firefox (and other free browsers), creativity software (Audacity, InkScape, Blender, Gimp), multimedia utilities and helpful Windows tools . A Mac version, MacLibre, is available, too.

On the Web front, JumpBox creates virtual machines that do easy installs for a number of popular, open source applications. I’ve installed a number of these “by hand” over the years (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, TikiWiki, PmWiki, MediaWiki and others), and it can be a royal pain. Others on the list I have tried… but couldn’t get past the steep learning curve for installation. JumpBox promises to make the process of installing web-side software that much easier. I haven’t tried it yet, but if I do, I’ll come back and let you know how it goes. It can’t be any harder than some of these installs (ahem… MediaWiki) are without support. There are currently 22 applications in the JumpBox library.

Previous post on open source, with list of additional free stuff.