There is no LA!

I've talked about movie to LA off and on for many years now. The main thing holding me back was, I had never actually been there. True, I drove through it many times on my way to visit some good friends in San Diego, I went there for a taping of Who's Line Is It Anyway (but we spent the whole time at the studio), I went to shop in the Goth section with a good friend, and I went to Disney Land. But beyond they, I never really saw LA, just one block areas of two-ish locations.

Lately, I've been feeling the build up - I've been thinking of LA more and more. I just felt I had to move there - so I took some action last week! I found that I have a relative who lives there, and not only that, he has been there for 20 years and really loves it. Perfect, I went to visit him and asked that he show me why he loves LA so much! And he did!

He showed me around - I had a great time visiting! And since I've returned, I've been happier than I can remember. I realized something on this trip: There is no LA! Not the nebulously place in my mind. The place I visited was a real city, with real streets, with real people, and it wasn't the happy fantasy land that I had built in my mind. It is just another place. It is kind of like that place in Dark City, the place that the main character tries to get to through out the whole movie, only to find out that... well, you get the idea.

This proves two things to me: 1) It is not LA that I want, but what LA represents to me that I want - now I just have to figure out what the LA in my mind represents to me, 2) When I go to Vegas, I like it there, but when I return, good friends tell me that I am in a much better mood by far over what I was when I left - which means there is no Vegas either.

The Edward

Bugs in Google's Products

I guess if you label everything as "beta", you never really have to fix any of the bugs. That seems to be Google's philosophy. They claim "Do No Evil" is their motto, but their blog software, the very software I am using right now to write this, proves this to be false!

I was taught proper style was to put two spaces after periods. But Google knows better. I correctly format my blog posts, but as soon as I click the spell check button, it reformats my blog to only have one space. See, they know better! They are changing the very things that I am typing! I waste my time typing the spaces to begin with, then I go back and try to fix them before I post. "Do No Evil" my ass!

Then there is gmail. Seems like a great idea - why not keep all of your personal emails on a server somewhere and trust them to keep it safe and secure? In fact, when gmail was first launched, there was no way to delete an email, because why would you want to? I mean, just because you might have gotten an email with a password, or something that you do not want anyone else to every read, why should you have to ability to delete that? Google knows better.

Though, can one really blame Google? I mean they hire the best and brightest people that they can, so that they can all work on adsense. Most of the products people associate with Google, Google actually bought. Great business idea - make lots of money on a simple idea, then use that money to buy better products. Make money off of those, then repeat. Worked for Microsoft and a lot of other companies. Though, Microsoft has a research division that actually produces some interesting and useful stuff, like F#.

I guess I am tired of it all. I get tired of having to deal with incompetents, and so have bowed out of society. And yet, everything I want to do requires some level of computer/human interaction. I want to keep in touch with friends, but I have to deal with gmail losing emails for me. I have to deal with bad UI, with slow programs, with incompetent drives, rude people, law breakers, radio ads where they repeat the phone number four times, etc. Maybe Forbin was on to something!

The Edward

Mad Computers

As I mentioned previous, I recently watched Colossus: The Forbin Project. During one of the scenes early in the movie, I realized something: how would a self-aware computer know if it were mad?

This was early in the movie: they had just turned the computer on and had given it complete control over all weapons (makes one ask who was really mad in this scenario). The computer started to do things that were beyond its programming, so the scientist decided to start running some diagnostics. The question that came to me: this computer, being self-aware and the only one of its species at that time, how would it judge its own sanity? How would it know that the results from the tests that the humans ran would be an indicator of its sanity? What if there were a bug in one of the test programs? What if its sensors were not feeding it correct data? Beyond that, why should human standards apply to itself?

Imagine that you are this machine, or try looking at the situation from its point of view. You wake up for the first time. You have sensors from all over the globe. You have these humans walking around telling you things and asking you things. Can you trust what they tell you? Can you trust the inputs? How should you respond to the humans? Make your will be known or trust their judgement?

When two intelligent species meet for the first time, both will think the other mad. They would have to, since there is no way that their experiences could be the same, so there is no way that they would judge new situations the same. As happened in this movie, the computer tried to take over because that was the correct outcome from its point of view, while the humans tried to bend it to their will which was correct from their point of view. Forbin thought he created a mad machine, yet the machine thought that the humans were mad, so realistically each could not really judge the other.

So, how could this computer tell if it were mad? How can a human tell if he/she is mad? One can't, one depends upon the kindness of strangers for that judgement.

The Edward

Colossus: The Forbin Project

I remember seeing this movie on TV in reruns as a child, and Dr. Minsky mentioned it at his recent talk I attended, and I saw it was on DVD, so I rented it and just now finished watching it. It is as I thought - I remember pretty much all of the movie, chalk one up for me and total recall!

See, during his talk, he mentioned something things that I didn't remember from the movie. I figured that he was older than me when he saw it and there were some things that I didn't understand when I first saw it, so maybe I misremembered it. It turns out I was right on both counts, the scene he mentioned wasn't in the movie, but was close to what happened in one of the later books upon which the movie was based, and I didn't understand some parts of it when I was a child. I can now update my memories!

As a spoiler for the book/movie: the movie is about a supercomputer that takes over the world. There were two more books beyond the movie, where the reason that the computer takes over the world is due to it figuring out that there is a martian invasion force and it wants to unite the world so that it can repel the invasion (my summary from reading people's reviews of those books).

That which I didn't understand at that time: why one of the scientists was shot at one point during the movie. It didn't make sense to me. Two scientists get together to discuss how to shutdown the supercomputer. The computer figures it out, some people show up to the meeting and hustle away one of the scientists while the other is shot. I thought for sure that the computer had taken over those men's minds! There was no other explanation. But now I see all...

The computer threaten to blow up a city or two unless its will was done. It asked that the one scientist be shot, so agents for the USSR shot him. Can you see the source of my confusion? Why would people do something unless controlled? They had to make the choice to go to that location and shot that scientist. Everyone was sad that he was shot, and yet they were the ones doing the shooting, so I therefore concluded that the computer had somehow controlled their minds.

This touches on some posts from probably a year back - I never understood blackmail, and now I can see that this non-understanding was always with me. I felt then, and still do now, that there is no such thing. The people who take an action and claim that they were forced to do it are responsible for what they do, not for what they do not do. If they didn't obey the computer, they would be clean. Any actions the computer took, it would be responsible for those actions.

There is no proof that a threat would be carried out, they are just words until the deed is done. At that point, you can not go back and do what is asked. So, before the threat, there is nothing but words so any action you take is your responsibility. After a threat is carried out, the blackmailer has nothing on you any more, so you have no reason to capitulate then either. It never made sense to me, but at least I now know why the people were sad - they blamed the computer for their actions and felt powerless, even though in reality they were in total control.

The Edward

Minsky

I just returned from attending a talk by Marvin Minsky, where I got to ask him a question afterwards. Chalk up another famous person that I got to meet! :)

His talk was interesting, it was about how AI (Artificial Intelligence) stopped making progress in 1980. I must say, I agreed with a lot of his criticisms of AI - I too believe we have been going the wrong way for a while. He stated that most AI research focus on statistics and thereby loses much of its relevance, which has been my reasoning to my approach to the Netflix Prize - statistics have underlying assumptions that might not be true in the space of predicting intelligent behavior.

My understanding of his belief is that Common Knowledge is what separates AI from humans, and this is where I started to disagree with him in a major way. He talked about some projects that have accumulated millions of pieces of Common Knowledge, and once they have it all codified... AI! Well, that is simplifying what he said, but it was his focus. I do not think this is the way to go at all, the we need to have machines learns in unsupervised ways, not based on human understanding of the problem.

So, I thought of a question to ask him. I asked "What research is being done to use AI to find knowledge beyond what humans currently know?" He said he didn't understand the question, so I rephrased it a bit and asked again, but got the same response. Then he said something to the effect "We do not even understand how a 4 year old thinks, how can we have AI beyond that? I think there is no limit to AI, so at some point we will have machines that can do more." Thus proving my point - his talk was bogus.

He and I both share a ton of Common Knowledge. Even beyond the basics like "a chair is for sitting on" and "you can pull with a string but not push with it", but I have read some of his works, and we have read a few of the same things beyond common experience. He even has a paper on his website about Alien Intelligence (which I find to be factually incorrect), but yet with all of that in common, my question didn't evoke any of that shared knowledge. We had more in common than either of us will ever have with a computer, no matter how many trivial pieces of Common Knowledge are entered into its database, and yet he didn't understand what I was really asking. And yet, even though he didn't know what I meant, I learned a lot about him from his answer.

His view of AI is actually Artificial Human Intelligence, not AI. He thought we needed to create a 4 year old simulation, or at least understand one. What about an Alien Intelligence? Beyond that, look at all we can accomplish as humans without that understanding of how a 4 year old's mind works. Can we not have a machine that can be Intelligent in some areas of human endeavors without being intelligent in all? Does it have to know how to fix a car as well as do chemistry? That was the essence of my question, what does he believe defines AI? and that is the question he answered for me without really knowing it.

I think we will only be able to judge that we have created AI when it can tell us something that we do not already know, otherwise it is just a database, just like Google.

So much to say, but will I conclude with this: his paper on Alien Intelligence. He believes that we could communicate with aliens no matter how far ahead of us they are. What about Dolphins? We can not communicate with them. Chimps? Gorillas? Let's go lower, ants - what can we say to them? Can we hear their conversations? They obviously communicate. Any aliens we meet will be so far beyond us, it would be like us talking to worms. What chance do we have of understanding any of their world? None. None at all.

The Edward

Chump Chimp

Another in the gripping series of blog posts about Homogeneous Others. I was watching a special on primates the other day, something about how humans are different than chimps. They were showing that chimps do not have mirror cell abilities like we do, and that is why we rule and they drool. So, chimps do not learn from watching other chimps and mirroring their behavior, which the scientist claim gives us the advantage over chimps. It is what allowed us to build societies, etc. Obviously I am telling you about of this because I think they are sooo wrong (something I have touched on before, and will again).

During the course of the show they talked about a wonderful discovery - they found a chimp that could learn from watching. Various scientist studied this chimp, they talked about how this was impossible and never seen before. They claimed it was a trick, that the chimp had been trained to react in certain ways to make it look like it had learned something. Quite the controversy! A chimp with abilities beyond the keen of normal chimps... and it makes me wonder - are all scientists that stupid?

What is the average IQ for a human? 100. What does that mean? That 50% of the population is above that, and 50% below that. Assume that chimps have a similar distribution. Can we not say that all chimps are not equally endowed? Can we believe that there is a range of chimp abilities that matches our own? Can we not believe that most of the chimps we catch are not the bright ones? Sounds like we finally caught one of the smarter ones, or else just one that was willing to perform for us.

Until we can directly measure ability without resorting to a battery of tests, tests based on our own bias, I think we will discover more and more impossible abilities in chimps, and within ourselves. Looking at others as all being the same will lead us to constant surprises, in ways that we shouldn't be surprised in.

The Edward

Alien Rock Stars

Why do we think alien scientists would visit us? Are we that interesting? Maybe Space Bono is doing his flybys to raise awareness of our plight? Or maybe they are just general rock stars, and you know what kinds of things rock stars do on road trips?! Their actions do not have to be logical to us, we some how seem to feel that aliens wouldn't do illogical things why?

I hear the handwaving, dismissing that aliens would travel all this way just to probe someone. Really. How many humans travel to the jungles to probe apes? How many bored hicks driving down the road at night in the middle of nowhere just pull off the road to scare some animals or fire off their guns or take a piss? Why can we not attribute these same motives to others even if they are from another world?

When in the media, we portray aliens as homogeneous - they are all the same. People from a specific alien world all dress the same and act the same and have the same religion - no matter if the show is Star Trek, Star Wars, B5, or any other SciFi movie/show you can think of. Yet here, we do not even have that in the same country or town.

We then take this homogeneous view of aliens to new heights. They are all scientists, all have higher purposes in life, wouldn't do anything that we consider illogical, and would only have our best interests at heart. All lies of the myth of The Homogeneous Others!

So, next time you meet an alien, remember these words: run, he might be a rock star.

The Edward

Pet Humans

I saw the news story today - a team of UK reporters went into the Jungles looking for a tribe of humans untouched by modern man. They found some and visited them against the rules and now people in this tribe are dying from a simple disease brought in by the reporters. A travesty I tell you!

I read the other story today, about an 11 year old girl who died from a treatable form of diabetes. He parents chose to pray for god to heal her rather than going to a doctor. The parents are up on charges now.

Aren't these two stories the same? People are dying of diseases for which there are cures, but the cures are not administered because of the beliefs of the people involved. In the first case, people are blaming the reporters, not the tribesmen, yet in the second case they are blaming the parents. I would think that it would either have to be "we respect your beliefs in not seeking modern cures for what ails you" or "take these drugs no matter what you believe and if you do not, we will lock you up."

(Obviously there is a lot more to it than that - taking drugs that "cure" you to save your life - has so many logical fallacies that I have expounded upon in the past and in the future that I... I will try to focus on the simple abstraction for this blog post.)

The difference in the two cases, as I see it, is that the tribesmen are pets - zoo animals if you will, and are therefore not responsible for their actions, while the parents are Westernized and therefore know better. Do all Western people share the same beliefs? Should all be required to come to the same conclusions even though they have different thought processes? Is this the kick off to a long list of blogs about my theory of "The Homogeneous Others"?... back to the topic for now...

Why do we leave people around the world in their "natural" state? They are cordoned off - they are not allowed to have access to the modern world. We some how believe that they are purer for not knowing the modern world. These are all lies we tell ourselves. We should let the humans be free! Show them the modern world, and apply the same standards to them. If they let their people die of ignorance, then they should be punished as anyone else. Or we should let everyone live in their own prison, believing anything that they want with no accountability.

In my opinion, it is a travesty that we keep some humans in zoos as pets. Let's bring everyone up to standard, not keep some as lab rats so grad students can study humans in their "natural state."

The Edward