The Future According to Paul

Four Classes of Robotic Armaggedon

2010-12-13T17:19:00.002-05:00

One estimate puts the number of robots dwelling among us at 11 million (as of mid 2010). If computers serve as guide, we can expect that number to increase rapidly as the years go by. Were the number of robots to increase at a rate of 10% a year, we'd have more robots than the present day human population by 2080. Self-replicating robots could cut that time frame dramatically.

Knowing that 11 million automated beings hide in factories and homes across this globe makes me a little worried. That's not an inconsequential army. Granted, almost all of those bots are highly specialized factory works who couldn't lift a gun if you wrote the software for them, but are we entering the era of the robot, and consequently, the threat of robot uprisings? When should we really start worrying, and what should we do if a mechanical judgment day comes?

The first step is, of course, precaution. The best way to avoid a robotic uprising is not training them to kill. We may have missed the boat on that one. At least the militaries of the world realize the importance of having a human making the shoot/don't shoot decision. Still, it's just a single feature requiring malfunction or tampering. The lack of strategic coordination among the robots also mitigates the threat, thus requiring a programming evil villain in the loop at present. You should be safe in the near term.

In the long term, who's to say? Of course, not all uprisings are created equal. The first question is if the robots have a shot at winning. Without access to heavy weaponry, extensive infrastructure support, and all-terrain movement, the uprising should turn out to be an inconvenience, not an Armageddon. What if we're not so lucky? I'd still divide the outcome into a few categories: bad, terrible, really-really-terrible, and not-all-bad. Let's hope for the last.

Robotic Uprising, the bad kind
This would be a low-intelligence, but highly effective attack by the robots. The most probable cause is haywire nuclear missile control, but a roboticized military turning against us isn't inconceivable. It's bad, because civilization gets destroyed. It's not terrible, because a clock starts ticking as soon as the attack begins. Robots break down. Nuclear arms are used up. As long as some humans living in remote locations make it a year or two, humanity can be rebooted. Even if we don't make it, the life left behind will have a chance to evolve its way to intelligence again. The most vicious nuclear onslaught is likely to leave life behind, if only in the depths of the sea. If surviving life evolves intelligence quickly, they'll even have the ruins of our civilization to learn from.

Robotic Uprising, the terrible kind
Much worse would be self-perpetuating robots with a dislike for biological sentience. Self repairing robots using solar energy could see to it that no new life takes hold as long as the sun keeps shining. Here, a small band of humans couldn't hold out past the end of days to see a new dawn: once the automatons take over, it's over. This scenario requires a much more sophisticated robotic ecosystem. The lesson, though, is that once we have self-perpetuating robots, we're moving into dangerous territory.

Robotic Uprising, Really-Really-Terrible kind
The last scenario had all life, or at least all life more advanced than a fish, being eradicated from the Earth forever. Is there really a more dismal scenario? Yup. I see it playing out much like the terrible version, with one crucial difference: robotic seeder ships. While we're still all buddy-buddy with the robots, we start constructing robotic settlement ships. They're built to fly to distant star systems, maybe construct a city and incubate a few humans when they arrive. Then they mine the local system, and set about building new probes to colonize new worlds. We'll explore and settle the stars!

Until the robots decide they don't like biological intelligence anymore. Then the seeder ships are re-purposed to seek it out and destroy it. In the "terrible scenario" we blotted out life on Earth, but we're just one of a trillion or more planets. In this scenario we set in motion an orchestrated effort to destroy all life anywhere. Whoops. Truly, a disaster of the greatest magnitude. If such a scenario seems at all possible, I hope we'll stockpile a planet destroying supply of fission, or anti-matter, bombs. Better that the Earth be turned into dust then risk eradicating life everywhere. Of course, once the seeder ships are out there, it might already be too late...

Robotic Uprisings: not all bad
I saved the least bad for last, so as to not end on the down note of universal extinction. I believe that the proper way to evaluate the consequences of any disaster are in terms of life, and in particular, intelligent life. The destruction of, say, a nation would be a tragedy, certainly. But in the grand scheme of things its a small blip. The miracle of Earth is first, life, and second, intelligence. The degree to which robots muck that up is the degree to which the uprising is bad, or really really really bad.

And the thing that makes life special is evolution. The biosphere is constantly changing, and usually improving. We went from microbes blindly reacting to environmental cues, through varying degrees of braininess, to the human mind, capable of unlocking cosmological secrets, capable of creative invention. Someday we may build a machine that's at least as capable of evolving as ourselves, where generation after self-replicating generation of machine is more intelligent, more creative, better than the last. Such a system could very well leave humanity behind, achieving intellect unlike anything we currently imagine. If such an improving, super-human creation were to turn against humanity, it'd just be Darwinism, in a way. Competition among species is as old as time, and if we create a truly superior specie, it might out-compete us in the end. I see nothing wrong with fighting such a creature: we need not go gently into the dark night. But, unlikely the other scenarios, mutual destruction would no longer be necessary. As long as life, be it biological or mechanical, is improving itself, things are well enough in the world. If we achieve any degree of artificial intelligence, I suspect we'll eventually reach this mastery of the art. The important thing, then, is seeing to it that we don't let the robots get out of hand, at least until that time.

An Ion Blast from Low Orbit

2010-12-08T20:44:00.003-05:00

Sometimes I start to write about a topic, and every few sentences find myself resisting getting pulled down some new tangent. These topics can be approached in so many different ways, it's hard not to keep writing until a book comes out. Attempting to expose the backstory for the original point I wanted to make, I'll find myself repeatedly backing up, deciding there's something else I should tell the reader first.

Wikileaks is that topic d'jour. Why has its release of diplomatic cables caused so much more furious a response than anything else its leaked. What's the legal and moral implications of the event? How is everyone reacting, and where's it all leading?

But what I originally wanted to talk about is the fact that Anonymous is attacking the credit card companies.

Anonymous is hard to characterize, exactly. It's a loose affiliation of computer savvy individuals, who've taken on such organizations as Scientology and the RIAA. They fight against censorship, against perceived injustices perpetrated by major corporations against defenseless individual citizens. And lately they have dropped their attention from antipiracy organizations to focus on the financial behemoths behind the economy.

While previous leaks by WikiLeaks have created some controversy, the fallout over the release of classified diplomatic cables is somewhat unprecedented. Many members of many governments throughout the world have been falling over each other to condemn the organization in the strongest words possible. It's a terrorist organization whose members should be assassinated, according to some. Arguably in response to this rhetoric, companies with links to WikiLeaks have been quick to sever them.

Amazon dropped its hosting of the site. Paypal froze its account, refusing any new contributions. Mastercard and Visa have also banned any payments to wikileaks through there systems. The effect of all this is to deny the organization access to capital at the same time its facing major technical attacks and legal battles. It's an odd situation, legally. WikiLeaks has not been formally accused of any crimes, but the attempts to remove it from existence are not really government actions. Is Mastercard in the right deciding that certain organizations don't deserve access to donations? This is one of those tangents I'm going to avoid going down.

Anonymous has sided with Wikileaks, arguing that the companies are in the wrong for trying to cut off a whistle blowing organization, that regardless of the moral questions around the appropriateness of this set of leaks, it's not the government or private industries role to silence undesired speech, even the revelation of secrets. So it's attacking, in its own peculiar form. As a primary internet based group, it fights through the dissemination and stopping of information. Some see it as a illegal mob, others as modern activists: another tangent.

The primary weapon anonymous uses is the DDOS, a technique to bring websites down. A computer server can only handle so many requests for a webpage at a time. By running code to, in essence, refresh a webpage all day, you can slow the page down. By running that code on thousands of computers, you can block entry by anyone. So for much of today mastercard and visa websites (but not the transaction processing servers) were down.

The code in question is called the "Low Orbit Ion Cannon", and can be downloaded by anyone. I find people's participation very interesting. A DDOS attack is a crime. Participating could involve a multiyear jail sentence. Do they not know? Not care? Figure in such a large crowd they won't be singled out? The victim can easily log the requests coming in, and through subpoena's find out who the attackers were. But despite the risks, real or perceived or ignored, people download the code and let their computers bring down credit card websites.

Thinking about it, I've realized they may be protected by an odd ally: the virus. It's easy to view the computer as just an extension of the self, but it is not necessarily only in our control. A traditional DDOS is not a group affair, but the tool of virus writers. a DDOS requires many computers spread out between many networks. Virus ridden machines will often spring silently to life to attack a distant server, without the owner noticing anything except perhaps a slower than usual internet. These botnets are almost certainly also involved in the attack against the credit card companies.

So how do you know who was attacking, and who just had a secretive virus buried in their machine? I suspect computer forensics could tell, but after the first round of trials for this, that would change. Activists would just visit unsafe sites, download trojan-laced programs, knowing that they were helping the attack while retaining plausible deniability.

This technique doesn't stop there, either. There have been horror stories over the years of viruses that pull kiddy porn onto your machine. I suspect these are written by the purveyors of such filth to avoid having to host the content themselves: much safer to let anonymous infected computers handle that risk. But if it's not already used as a screen, I suspect it will be eventually: a virus that downloads inappropriate material to your machine for you. Thousands will be infected unknowingly, a few will seek out the computer infection for the files, and how do you ever tell the two groups apart?

Identity theft was just the start. With computers in between us, it becomes impossible to test for intention. As more of our lives go online, as more crimes are committed in the digital ether, detection of crime may become the easy part of law. The hard part would be figuring out who the computer committed the crime for.

Comcast and L3

2010-12-03T21:27:00.002-05:00

I always read the comments on online news. I think it's a wonderful view into the process of society moving. Interactions, the spread of ideas: it's all stored in 1's and 0's for us to examine.

The internet feels nebulous, but it's built on very real hardware spread across the world. No one entity owns the internet, instead millions of companies and billions of people each own a little piece. The science and technology of the connections, the mathematics of the virtual information speeding down copper wires, the economic transactions between billions that makes it all work: it's an interesting topic, but in many ways an esoteric one. Like most other things in moden society, a small group of people specialize deeply in each aspect, and make it work.

So it's interesting when the small details are brought to the broader attention of the public. This happened recently in an ongoing dispute between Comcast and L3. Each presented a different set of facts to the public, and in online news and the related comments sections I've watched as consensuses formed. First, there was anger at Comcast, and accusations this was about stopping Netflix from replacing cable tv. Then Comcast's arguments were considered, and the discussion turned towards absolving Comcast. Maybe L3 was in the wrong here? People taught each other about peering and CDN's, short arguments were developed explaining sides, and last I saw people were solidifying their views, the debate seeming to be won by the L3 side, but with moderate disagreement as is always true in a controversy.

The very short of it is that Comcast, provider of internet to residential areas, and L3, who owns heavy duty connections between far flung ISPs, had a peering agreement. This said that since they were sending about the same amount of data to each other, there was no need to calculate detailed bills. It was a wash, they carried each others data for free. Netflix contracted L3 to stream movies for it, Comcast claimed L3 now owed it money, and L3 said Comcast is just trying to block Netflix.

It's murky, because there are two types of data transfers. If a Comcast customer sends an email to Verizon, and it travels across the L3 network, L3 gets paid. Comcast is paid by its customer, Verizon by its customer, but nobody is paying L3. In contrast, if Comcast and Verizon are directly connected, it's not clear either should pay. Even if Comcast is sending far more emails to Verizon, it's in both companies interest to make sure the email gets through. If not, both have angry customers.

So in that regard, Comcast is sending data across L3, but L3 is supplying Comcast with data it's customers explicitly requested. Comcast argues that the previous Netflix provider did provide them, and that L3 is looking for a unfair advantage. L3, and before it Aakamai, are acting as CDNs, Content Distribution Networks.

But again, the term is ambiguous. In one sense, both L3 and Akamai distributed content, so they're in the same business. But they did it dramatically differently. Aakamia essentially paid Comcast to host the content, acting as a middle man. L3 already has networks across the country, so it just places the computers on its network. In a sense, the computers just move a few miles. But now, they're moving around like the rest of the content on the internet, a middle man was just removed.

It's these subtle distinctions that define the situation. Is a CDN distributed content hosting, or is it a specific way of doing it, purchasing service from your customer's ISP? Is "peering" just traffic that passes across a network elsewhere, or does it include traffic destined for the other network. But these distinctions have the potential to dramatically change who makes billions and who goes under, what sort of internet you get and for what costs, even whether things like high fidelity video conferencing will change business or not.

It's been heartening to watch thousands of people online all unraveling, at least a little, the interconnections and implications of the topic.

Live Forever and Die Young

2010-10-03T11:12:00.003-04:00

Life predates death, but just barely. At some point in the dim past, in a small pond or in the depth of the ocean, a twiggy bit of proto-RNA, or a fat globule stuffed with hydrocarbons, appeared. It was random chance, an unusual reaction, but with that life had begun. And like all familiar forms of life, this ancestor set off to make a copy of itself.

It succeeded. It may have succeeded a few times, starting a small extended family with total ignorance about death. Mostly, they lacked any organelles remotely capable of conceptualizing anything, especially abstract concepts like death. But there was also a lack of practical experience at play.

Then, death swirled his metaphorical bony finger in that pond, announcing his arrival. Perhaps torsion in the water ripped a creature in two. Perhaps the reproductive act failed, leaving two molecules trapped in a deathly embrace. But just moments after life, death was here.

Odds are pretty good that life and death will depart together, the last creature exiting, hand in hand, with the last death. Entropy isn't the swiftest foe, but its a dedicated one. Still, the rules of death are amenable to change. As long as a star is fusing elements together, there's energy a life can use to extends its existence.

The younger among us may live to see the day when medical technology possesses power to banish non-accidental death. Futurist Ray Kurzweil believes even the middle aged will make it to that victory. Even if it comes centuries from now, some civilization is going to have to face the social repercussions of practical immortality. Our body does an impressive job keeping itself repaired, a little help from nanotechnology and the genetic engineering away of certain 'kill switches' in our genes, could push our maximum age back arbitrarily far.

The "replacement rate" for humans is currently somewhere around 2.3 children per woman. If every woman had 2.3 children, our population would remain constant. As we prevent childhood deaths and infertility, the number approaches 2. When we have more children than this, our population grows, and on a finite world we will eventually reach some maximum capacity for supporting life.

But the replacement rate assumes a constant rate of death as well. If nobody dies, there's no-one to replace, so the replacement rate falls to 0. Adding in voluntary death and accidents, a few babies become necessary, but a very small amount compared to our biological drive to reproduce. An immortal civilization will face very hard choices about how to handle birth and death, putting a choice once dictated by fate into human hands.

The most pleasant solution is pushing off the population cap. Immortality supplanted with the colonization of space could see each generation being sent to new, untapped worlds. Kurzweil predicts that the ability to upload the mind into a simulated Eden will avoid overpopulation issues. If the mind is just a physical pattern, and that pattern can be reproduced in bits, computers could provide a massive location for storing generations past, a location where the living could interact freely with the 'dead', removing the sense of loss from bodily expiration.

But its not clear that either of those solutions will come to pass, or provide a long term solution to geometric population growth. Absent new worlds, real or simulated, to keep our forefathers population balance will need to be provided by society. The fairest solution may be abstention: the technology to stop death exists, but isn't used. Or if the allure of an extra century or three of life is too great, life extension could be provided up until a point. At some predefined age, death is mandated.

Practically, the solution seems fair. Overpopulation is averted, and while the government will eventually have you killed, you'd have achieved a longer than natural life. Still, mandated death dates have a chilly, distopian feel to them. I suspect not everyone will go gently into that good night. And in a way its just another form of abstention, possessing life giving technology but refusing to hand it out.

What if we wanted to allow immortality, perhaps for the few? It'd be an interesting experiment at any rate: what would a youthful body 800 years old think of? Would they be like a species above us, masters of endless knowledge and skills? Or would their brain fill up, and their abilities fail to exceed our own? Would they become trusted advisers, fonts of first hand knowledge from centuries of civilization, or just a burden and source of jealousy for the rest?

Will we turn to the free market for a solution? Auctioning off slots to the next century? A free-market proponent could argue that wealth corresponds with an individuals contribution to society, and that the most contributing deserve more time on Earth, but the solution strikes me as too distasteful for adoption. While we already portion off life saving technology by wealth, I'm inclined to believe this discrepancy has a limit, and that the populace won't accept an immortal ruling class lightly.

There's one solution that frightens me most, because it feels so fair on the face of it. Immortal despots, death panels and brains encoded into 1's and 0's are very science fiction. They don't strike me as the sorts of solutions people would actually choose. But what if the 'replacement rate' was made more concrete? What if immortality is granted as long as you have no children? With the birth of a first child, some clock could be set, perhaps just the removal of age-defying treatments. The parent could live a traditional full life: 60 years, perhaps, to see the children grow up and make their own lives, before they need to pass on. Then death becomes a choice, a trade off for a deep biological need, and a morale obligation to give other lives a chance at realization.

Sounds fair doesn't it, or at least as fair as is likely when immortality is real? But what sort of world would this create? I suspect lots of people wouldn't wait much longer than they do now. Some would experience life for centuries, or longer, only passing on when they'd experienced all they wanted to experience in this life. But then there's the edge of the bell curve...

A few people would chose not to have children ever, preferring self preservation to reproduction. Perhaps sociopaths, having no concern for others, would see no need to create new life. The intensely narcissistic, the ego-maniacal, the greedy, seeing at no point in time an advantage in giving up their self-important life, would pass generation to generation. The well adjusted will accept death, sooner or later, as an integral part of being. Even if those self absorbed make up a minuscule fraction of the population, each generation would add a few more to their numbers. The good die, the bad live on. The good die, the bad live on. Then one day birth is all but gone, as only the self obsessed are left. Such a good meaning solution. Such a dreary end.

There's a theory that the reason we can't find signs of alien life is a tendency for civilizations to self destruct at some point in their evolution. This idea seems less popular now, being much more visceral during the threats of the cold war. I'd always dismissed it somewhat out of hand, as more a projection of fears than a reasonable theory. But on thinking about life extension, I can start to see the sort of seed that would rip societies apart. What if the technology was ubiquitous and strict rules could not be placed on the use? What if the solutions all require despotic control, the sort antithetical to a civilization's advancement? Will we adjust to the siren song of immorality? Do any species?

Do We Have Gravity Backwards?

2010-09-09T20:47:00.005-04:00

Electromagnetic radiation allows us to see the universe. From radio waves as long as football fields, up through the colorful wavelengths of visible light and on to high powered x-rays and gamma rays, electromagnetic radiation is our principle tool for observation. Even when we switch to magnets or touch we've just swapped one form of electromagnetism for another.

What if some forms of matter don't react with electromagnetic radiation? A very clear plane of glass is transparent to the colors we see, but still opaque to other wavelengths. What if a structure was totally invisible? You could pass through it without ever knowing it was there. The only evidence would be the slight tug of gravity.

A globule of the stuff on Earth might evade detection forever, presumably drifting down into the molten core of the planet for an even better hiding spot. But on galactic scales the impact of the gravity would be visible on other matter. And astronomers have detected just that. Galaxies with insufficient mass to mathematically hold together do anyways. When you tally the things we see with the gravity we measure, they don't add up. Science has named this discrepancy dark matter. The leading candidate explanation right now is exotic particles that just don't react to light.

Einstein taught us that gravity is a distortion of spacetime by a massive object. The universe is like a trampoline: when something is placed on it, it bends the structure around it. Another object placed down will tend to roll towards the first object, obeying the attractive force of gravity (As an aside I've never really liked this way of explaining gravity. Why does the trampoline distort around an object? Gravity is pulling the object down towards the Earth, and the trampoline is in the way. We explain what gravity does by alluding to gravity).

There's an alternative explanation I've come up with. We see regular matter at the bottom of gravity wells, in exact proportions to the strength of the gravity, and as the matter moves the gravity does too. So we say that the matter distorts space, creating the gravity. What if that's backwards? What if spacetime is curved all on its own, and matter just pools in the low places? That is, what if protons, electrons and the whole gang don't bend space around them, just follow the existing grooves? You'd still see lots of matter in very dense places, but the cause and effect would be reversed. Gravitational distortions wouldn't follow a sun around, the sun would roll around to keep inside the distortion. Dark matter stops being a mysterious particle, and just becomes a gravity well that hasn't been totally filled.

Physical theories need tests. The most straightforward one I can think of is looking for cases where a massive body is caught in the grip of even larger one: A star passing by a black hole perhaps. If the gravity well travels too close to the blackhole, it may fall in. But if it skirts by its ever so closely, ejecting around the other side, the energy pooled in the star might fall in while the gravity well continued on its way. Dark matter being produced by super nova might also be a clue, with the great explosion ejecting mass from the gravity well. Finer measurements of gravity might allow us to use more practical sized objects.

Happy Labor Day

2010-09-06T20:34:00.004-04:00

September 4, 1882 Thomas Edison turned on the world's first commercial electric power plant, lighting one square mile of Lower Manhattan. The following morning would mark the first observation of Labor Day in the United States.

From peasant uprisings, through strikes and political lobbying, labor disputes have been part of the fabric of civilization since its inception. But from the industrial revolution onwards they took a different tone. Work took a different tone. Man could now wield power external to his body.

Animals and fire served that role first, but the introduction of water wheels and the mastery of steam power greatly bolstered the force with which man could reshape his surroundings. Edison's electric station turned the electron to man's bidding, one more ally in reshaping the universe.

One of the defining questions of civilization is 'how should things be shared when want exceeds supply?' In a sense, this is the foundational question in politics and in economics. The basic answer we seem to always return to is: you deserve reward proportional to your contribution to the process of obtaining it.

But with mastery of the elements, and the introduction of repeatable, predictable, automatable processes, the balance of labor shifted. Within a factory, the ability of a man to produce was magnified immensely. Suddenly, measuring contribution becomes difficult.

Does the man toiling in a field not yet touched by automation suddenly deserve a much smaller portion of the society's goods? And what of the machinery's contribution? Does the man working the machine deserve the riches of the machine, or does the machine's inventor? Or the man who arranged to have the machine built?

The industrial revolution was a liquid period in human civilization. The rules were changing, new forces were at play. The labor movement was a series of physical battles fought between people to set the new rules of society. As the heat of change cooled, society started recrystallizing, new social norms in place for how to manage an economy in a world with electricity.

The story of the labor movement is filled with victories: the weekend, the slowly shortening workweek, rights for workers and comfortable wages. But in a sense, the entrepreneurs and investors won. They were the ones seen setting in motion progress. Society weighed down in favor of the idea that wealth mostly belongs to the inventor, to the machine owner, to the one organizing work.

Thirty-four years before Edison's factory opened, before Labor Day was observed, Karl Marx published the Communist Manifesto. Marx believed workers would unite and claim ownership of the fruits of labor, destroying social strata and autocratic economic governance. That hasn't happened. Karl Marx's mistake, I'd argue, was believing that the 'crystallization' of society would keep proceeding at the rate it was during his life. That soon man would have invented what he was going to invent, that life would settle into pastoral routine of early ages, when each generation relived their parents' lives. Perhaps it will someday, and he was just early. But change is innate to complex organisms like a society. Technology can greatly disrupt established orders, but we manage to do so on our own even without it.

What Marx saw coming was a day when each generation looked exceedingly similar to the one before it. What would business be in such an environment? Each adult would have his role: keeping this machine functioning, seeing that coal was delivered from this mine to these factories. Businesses would not rise and fall, but plod along with predictable returns each year. In such an environment, of what use is the entrepreneur, of the investor, of the executives? The system today elevates them, treasures there ability to navigate in changing times, but that role is lost in a predictable environment.

His call for the workers of the world to unite never happened. Communist states appeared, but the brotherhood of the worker never overcame the social force of national identity. There was no need to question why grandchildren of businessmen deserved such power because technology kept everything changing, new inventions created new wealth. If anything change has been accelerating.

Labor Day celebrates the efforts of men and women in ensuring the quality of life of the worker, the right of the worker to exist as a powerful political and social entity. It's a story of struggle, requiring an antagonist, filled sometimes-fairly, sometimes-not by the executive. What's ahead in labor relations? I don't expect the struggle to ever end, really. Incredibly intelligent AI might achieve peace in labor relations, ending man's need to worry about such things. We may create a Matrix for ourselves, a simulation of world' without scarcity, man made gardens of Eden. But more strongly I suspect that our civilization will stretch out through the stars, and each passing millenia will see new battlefields for Labor Day remembrances.

Computers: Slightly Less Magic Than They Could've Been?

2010-08-09T18:52:00.003-04:00

Our suspicions may have been confirmed: P may not have equaled NP all along.

The P=NP question has been the seminal problem in theoretical computer science since forever ago (for the computer value of forever: 40 years give or take). To simplify it past any resemblance of truth, P is basically the group of all 'easy' problems, and NP is the group of all 'easy to correct' problems. If I gave you a computer program and told you it could always win at chess, how would you go about confirming that's true? Not very easily. But if I told you there's a 3,000 mile car trip that visits every state capital in America, and tell you the roads to take, you'd just have to count up the miles to see if it's true. Proving a computer program does something is not in NP, but proving that there's a path of some length between cities is. The question, then, is if there's an easy way to confirm a solution is true, can you easily come up with the solution too? (If I give you a map, can you come up with the shortest path between all the state capitals?) Computer scientists have suspected 'no', but demonstrating this is true has been fraught with difficulty.

People try to prove this all the time, and they fail. Vinay Deolalikar apparently emailed a 100 page proof to a group of respected researchers, and the paper eventually ended up on the Internet. Then the Internet became abuzz, an article was written on slashdot, and tweets of 'Deolalikar' skyrocketed past any previous level he'd experienced. Daniel Lemire raised a good question: why? What about this proof has gotten such discussion, as opposed to countless other attempts at a proof? Which is a really interesting question in general.

News transmission requires two participants: someone to tell the news and someone to hear it. You're hearing, or rehearing, this news from me. All in all, I'll probably end up telling 15 or so individuals about this event. Each of you may pass the news on to someone new, or let this trail of the story of Deolalikar's proof attempt end.

Coincidently, just like in my last post linking auto-immune diseases, SEO and planted evidence there's a illness connection here. The study of news transmission began in the study of epidemics. Instead of giving you a disease, I'm giving you a fact. Sorry, antibiotics won't help this time. Maybe enough alcohol, consumed very quickly, will wipe the fact from your mind? On the plus side, P = NP would have been great news for robots, so Computer Science is arguably less likely to kill you now.

What was discovered in epidemics is that the crucial value for deciding if a sickness will turn into a pandemic is the average number of people a sick person passes the disease onto before dying or getting better. If they average, say, 0.9 people, then the disease will dwindle and vanish. But if the average is, say, 1.2 people, then it'll explode through the population, each day the legions of sick increasing. Same thing with zombies. Same things with news and memes.

The P=NP? proof is a particularly good example of this. The knowledge of this paper started out just in Deolalikar's head. He gave the paper to a few other researchers. If the proof was poorly done, it would have ended there. But it was exciting enough that the researchers wanted to share it with > 1 other person each. There was an initial outbreak of this knowledge, eventually reaching slashdot.

Slashdot, having a vast readership, is particularly apt at transmitting an idea. For an instant the average person told skyrocketed by its introduction. The analogy is that the virus has reached the water supply, or the zombies have entered New York City. There was a phase change in outreach.

Sometimes news sources provide stories that don't excite us, that don't have a viral spread > 1. These peter out of the public discourse. But the blog posts and tweets since the slashdot story demonstrate again that there's a viral nature to this story. And here I am telling you.

Viral spread isn't a constant value, as eventually the susceptible are all infected. And not everyone is susceptible, by genes or geographic isolation. Or in this case, interests. Not all the readers of this blog are computer science aficionados, so this is more likely to be the end of the line then the computer science-centric blogs I've read this story on. It still might have another major outbreak if it reaches a mainstream news source. Or alternatively, if other theoreticians can't find any problems with the proof the story will 'mutate', and grow even more viral. Million dollar prizes always make good stories.

Returning to Dan's question, what made the story viral? P=NP is about as pop-culture as unsolved mathematics can be. The proof is apparently plausible. Releasing the paper by email is novel and interesting. And "I am pleased to announce a proof that P is not equal to NP, which is attached in 10pt and 12pt fonts" is a great way to announce one of the pinnacle proofs of our time.

One of the interesting things about viral spread is how small the critical value is. 0.95 people per iteration is a non-story, 1.05 can spread across the world. Thus it may be that the font comment was enough to push it across, and without it we'd have had to wait for more actual confirmation of the proof before hearing about it.

I find networks to be an endlessly interesting topic, and this is a great practical example of it. It also shows a news source acting as a facilitator of a story with wide popularity rather than pushing a story because of the source's reach. It'd be an interesting metric to see what news sources respond to and create viral spread, and which just push ideas that couldn't hold up in an organic global discussion.

As cool as a P=NP world would be, best of luck to Deolalikar, I hope you've earned your way into the pantheon of computer science greats.

It was him.

2010-08-07T12:11:00.003-04:00

The human body is equipped with a remarkably effective defense system. Once a dangerous substance has gotten into your body, it needs to push its way past the cell walls containing Defensin, a protein designed to keep bad things out. While the invader struggles to get in, it is liable to be eaten by Granulocytes and Macrophages, or marked for attack by a passing B cell. Even once infiltration is achieved, the body will seek out the compromised cells and destroy them with Killer T and NK Cells. Infections and illnesses come, but the body almost always wins in the end.

But such a powerful defensive weapon has a cost, as the HIV virus reveals. A powerful immune system can be turned against the body, destroying what it was built to protect. Some allergies exhibit a similar phenomenon, where the immune system gets over eager in destroying foreign particles. A lack of defenses leaves a system vulnerable to attack, but excessively capable defense systems are liable to be misused by outside forces.

The lesson doesn't just apply to the body. Google is caught in a war against 'black hat' search engine optimization. Do you ever see spam in the comments of an article? They often don't expect you to click on the link to purchase cheap knock-off purses, but they do expect Google to see the link, and return the target website higher in search results. Huge swathes of the internet are made up of dummy webpages, computer generated, intended only to look legitimate so the links to a real webpage are followed by Google and considered more authoritative.

When these tricks work, Google is left redirecting its users to scams and overpriced stores. So it works hard to identify these tricks and nullify them. If Google catches you gaming its system, it will remove you from its indexes, forever cutting you off from the biggest provider of pageviews around. The threat of banishment from its indexes is a very effective deterrent.

It also creates a powerful weapon to be abused. If you can't rank your website higher, causing your competitors to get kicked out of the index is the next best thing. Performing black hat search engine optimizations on another website can trigger Google's defenses against an innocent target, bringing advantages to the perpetrator. This is making Google's job harder.

And then there's law. Allegations of police officers planting drugs on suspects has a long history. It's difficult to catch someone in the act of a crime like drug use, so possession is used as a reasonable marker of intent and criminalized. But possession can be faked by an enemy, turning the sizable defensive weapon of the criminal justice system to twisted ends. Very recently, after 8 months of being abused and ostracized, a man was cleared of possession of child pornography after an employee of his bragged about planting the photos on his computer. In this case justice was eventually served, but its certainly the case that not every framer is foolish enough to leave behind a trail or brag about his crime.

The improper triggering of defensive mechanisms is, to some extent, unavoidable. The cost of letting an attack succeed in any setting can be too great to sustain. Thus a balance must be found that will inevitably include false positives, be it the creation of allergies or the imprisonment of the innocent. Still, it's a very important lesson to remember that evidence is easy enough to manufacture. When the penalties for a crime can ruin a life, especially based on the ultimately circumstantial evidence of possession of outlawed goods, some extra care must be taken. Things aren't always what they seem.

The Flipbook Universe

2010-07-24T20:15:00.003-04:00

The universe is a very active place. From the collision of stars and fiery supernovas down to the effervescent fizz of virtual particles that make up the smallest filaments of reality, things are always moving.

The dynamic nature of the universe is almost a given...and yet, is it real? Consider instead the flip book universe:

The flip-book, besides being a strategy in getting through a particularly dry lecture, serves as an interesting model for understanding the universe. It's a two dimension reality that exists within three, the third dimension making the passage of time possible. Each page is static, unchanging. But if you flip the book, creating varying perspectives on the pages, you can observe the arrow of time working its magic.

There are other ways to construct the same phenomena. The movie projector shines light through a series of static images to project them onto another object. Precursors like the kinetoscope would often rotate a cylinder with images, showing one at a time through a slit.

The same phenomena could be creating you and me. Are we really dynamic, three dimensional objects, or are we just fixed features on a higher dimensional rigid object, spinning on its axis, creating the illusion of a passing time? When the universe completes its rotation, will we be back where we started, ready for yet another pass through an unchanging story of life, the universe and everything?

I'm not sure that there are explicit, scientific tests you could run to ever answer the question. The idea may be trapped forever in the realm of philosophy. For any layer of dynamic activity could just be a transcription on a higher dimension. And how could the sketched character, unchanging moment to moment, leave his page to observe the full sketch book?

If it's true, though, I look forward to repeating my experiences with you the next time reality completes its cycle.

Pawns and Processors, Bytes and Bishops

2010-06-24T18:30:00.005-04:00

In a game famous for it's prodigies, Magnus Carlsen of Norway stands out as something special. He was the third youngest chess grandmaster ever (age 13). Youngest #1 player ever (age 19). At 19 he also holds the third highest ELO score ever, putting him with the top chess players of all time (although wikipedia informs me that score is subject to inflation and thus debatable). Apparently you don't usually hit peak chess ability until 25 at the earliest, so being the best in the world at 19 promises for a long, dominating career.

Why do I bring him up? Because his childhood spent mastering chess included lots of time playing against computers. Carlsen is obviously one of those rare individuals that excel at some task far beyond the abilities of others. But could screen time have contributed to his almost unique skill? It's an answer we'll have to wait and watch for as new generations of chess players enter the world stage. Carlsen could be a fluke, or a precursor of what's to come.

The argument for software being a major cause of Carlsen goes like this: natural ability is not enough to be the best in the world. It's a requirement, but insufficient. Chess greats throughout history have put countless hours into studying chess: memorizing moves, playing games. This is true of any skill: you need to paint lots of pictures, write lots of words, hit lots of fastballs to make it big. Natural aptitude is a clay that gets formed into a specialized machine with repetitions and practice.

But not all practice is equal. Joe Mauer, 3 time A.L. batting champ, perfected his swing against a contraption his dad invented that would drop a ball at his eye level. With so little time between seeing the ball and the ball passing his waist, Joe had to develop an exceptionally quick swing. More generally, how often do strong high school sports programs exist for decades at a time? Partially elite performing schools attract transfers, but partially the talent in a program encourages everyone to perform at a greater level.

As a child, I played chess against my mother. For a long time she'd beat me every game. Eventually I surpassed her, winning most (but not all) of our matches. And then I stopped improving. It wasn't until years later that I started playing chess on Yahoo that I noticed myself improving again. I had found a challenge.

If you practice a competitive skill against players below your level, it's much harder to improve. Failures teach us. If you only see 50 mph fastballs, how do you learn to hit a 95 mph one? You're not developing the reaction time, the muscle memory, or the poise to do so. So it is with a chess prodigy. Eventually you surpass your parents, local children, then local adults. You can travel the world playing tournaments against the current generation of greats, but there's only so many such games you can get in. Often the chess prodigies will find a skilled player to mentor them, but the truly great will surpass even them.

Enter the computer, capable of calculating dozens of moves in advance. The computer can now play on par or better than any human in the world. In the coming years, that advantage will only grow. Any child with a computer now has access both to talented players across the world via the internet, and against their own, personal AI chess master. There is no need to arrange games against other greats, traveling far to play: from the comfort of your room you can pit yourself against the best.

As computers soar in their processing power, defeating all comers, they threaten to trivialize chess. But simultaneously they offer us the opportunity to reach previously unattainable levels of skill. And chess could just be the start. From math to literature, sports to debate, engineering to leadership computers may soon give us the opportunity to prove ourselves in challenges previously unknown. Carlsen is a wonderfully brilliant young man. He may also be a pioneer.

The other solution to the Prisoner's Dilemma

2010-06-16T20:45:00.002-04:00

Sometimes I'll sit down and blog the thoughts that come to mind. Other times I'm thinking interesting ideas and happen to be near the computer. Then there are the topics that bounce around my head for months, where I intend to write something, but it always feels so...daunting. Eventually you'll get my theory of negative mass, but...not yet.

Of course when you wait long enough somebody else might present your idea first. Thanks "Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal." Besides making me laugh, you've now gotten me to write a blog post. (I'm sure this idea has been presented before that, but I'm not about to go 'research' the history of it. Independently arrived at by at least me and SMBC. All I need to know. Hurrahs for not being in academia).

So read the comic if you haven't already.

I've seriously been meaning to blog that for months. A slightly different take, naturally, but the idea of Jesus as fundamentally presenting an alternative solution to the prisoners dilemma. In our pro-capitalist society we've come to accept the turn-coat solution to the prisoner's dilemma as the correct one. It's the reason it's a famous thought experiment. Game theory says you should rat out your compatriot. But I find it interesting how many ways Jesus comes out against that solution.

'Turn the other cheek' is one of the fundamental lessons Jesus taught, and I feel like Christianity has lost sight of that. The impulse to fight evil is strong. It's the natural reaction. Half of the solutions to the prisoner's dilemma involve the party trying to do good losing out to the party being mean. So the solution where you're both mean, and thus can't take advantage of each other is tempting. But ultimately, isn't the cooperative solution best?

"It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God." I know this religion can be a bit critical of science, but you don't need very advanced physics to understand that won't happen. Even the poor in America are proportionally fairly rich. I have to wonder if it bothers Americans that Jesus has essentially told us we aren't getting in to heaven. The devout must assume they'll push the camel through. Good luck.

But again, from the Prisoner's Dilemma standpoint, it makes sense. You don't get rich in the cooperative column. You get taken advantage of. You get fleeced, your money taken. You build up wealth in the turncoat column. That's the basis of game theory, of objectivism. The idea that things will go well for everyone if you always look out just for yourself. But Jesus' point, and it's a valuable one, is that looking at your own self gain is not the point. Look at the global good. That's what you should optimize.

If someone hungry steals your bread, isn't that a net positive in the world? Now two people can eat. The concern is always that this line of thinking leads to the immoral getting an advantage. People so often oppose social safety nets because some percentage might take advantage of it and not work. So? Just because someone's bad, why are they less deserving of comforts and rewards?

It's a weird way to think, but when enough people think that way things are better for everyone. If you can accept good things happening to bad people, and bad things happening to good people, you can see to it that better things happen to people in general. I find it interesting to think of heaven and hell not as brimstone and harps waiting on the other side of the graveyard, but as the future. If we're good, our children can live in peace and sustenance. If we're bad, they'll have to eke a living from a scourged shell of a planet. And how to we get to the heaven-as-a-good-future? By ignoring our personal desires, ignoring the overwhelming urge to meter justice, and to just do best by the world. Two thousand years later I think we're still misunderstanding Jesus. Do unto your neighbor as you would have him do unto you.

Putting the fun in fungible

2010-06-13T13:51:00.002-04:00

Money is a classic example of a fungible resource. That means you don't particularly care which twenty dollar bill is yours, or even if you've got two tens instead. Houses are not fungible: you can't just arbitrarily trade two houses and expect both participants to be happy. If I lend someone five dollars, I don't expect them to retrieve that particular bill when they pay me back. If I lend them "Catcher in the Rye", though, I don't expect to be returned "Alice in Wonderland" or even another, heavily highlighted copy.

This is all nice, and helps the economy run smoothly. But the fungible nature of money can make thinking about money deceptive. Five dollars is five dollars, but five dollars spent in one place is not equivalent to five dollars spent elsewhere. The money is fungible, the act of spending money is not.

Think about a decision to send a spacecraft to the moon, at a cost of perhaps a billion dollars. At that price, we could probably buy every human in the world a serving of rice for a week. But does that mean the spacecraft took 50 billion meals of rice away from the world? No, of course not. Rice production and spacecraft production are such disparate worlds that money spent in one shouldn't really affect the other very significantly.

What did spending the billion dollars on the spacecraft cause? Well, oil, steel and electronic elements were probably the biggest physical expenditures. Thus a little less steel might exist for sale on the market. That in turn may have inched its price up just a fraction, and perhaps a few people in the long run ended up holding off buying a new car. Electricity was certainly used up heating and lighting factories and offices, powering computers where the design occurred. Because electricity is also fungible it's hard to point to one particular thing the spacecraft effort impacted. But perhaps higher energy costs ultimately caused a handful of families to keep the thermostat a little lower that winter. Resources like electricity and steel have limited availability, so in one sense choosing to use them for one task removes their availability for another task. But you can't convert rice into steel to meet one need with another.

Which is all a simplification, of course. Oil use could increase demand for alternative fuel sources like ethanol which could use up corn, which could increase demand for rice. Or the electricity used by the offices might just come out of excess capacity they had just in case, increasing efficiency in the system and thus being 'free'.

When you've got a billion dollar project, the priciest part is usually the humans. Thus the investment in a spacecraft is less significant in terms of allocation of steel then it is in allocation of minds. The money goes to scientists to design and build this craft. Perhaps it'll improve employment rates a tiny bit, but it seems likely most of the people involved in building a spacecraft could find other work. So the projects biggest impact might be taking minds away from other tasks.

One line of thinking holds that even though none of the scientists would have been rice farmers, they might have been, say, a manager at an industrial factory. So now a line worker becomes the manager, opening up a position a farmer's son fills instead of working the farm. But even if there is some truth to this, every subsequent link lessens the impact.

People are the ultimate in non-fungible resources. We're all different. Perhaps one of the scientists involved in the spacecraft effort would have worked designing cars instead, pushing fuel efficiency up a tiny notch. Or maybe another would have been a manager, and done a poor job at it, causing rippling effects in stock prices and resource usage. The existence of a billion dollars worth of work for aerospace engineers might influence the next generation in college, producing more in that field and less in, say, astronomy. That might influence very gently our understanding of the cosmos. It might be an inefficient allocation if fewer spaceships are build in the next generation.

And we could do the same thing for buying a fifty billion servings worth of rice. How does land usage change? Nitrogen usage? Transportation of the rice? Who do you need to farm and distribute the rice, and what would they have done otherwise? Although each project costs $1 billion dollars, they aren't fungible in how they impact the world.

It's easy to just visualize the economy as a ledger. A dollar is spent here, fifty dollars of oil are burnt there. Because dollars are such an easy abstraction to think about, it becomes tempting to equate things with the same cost. A second car or a vacation can be equivalent decisions in terms of cost, but they can ripple through the economy in very different ways.

You'll never predict all the ways an individual economic action will ripple through time. But it is important to keep in mind when thinking about money. People often complain about spending money on NASA when people are hungry in the world. But they're aren't trivially connected. Cutting NASA doesn't end world hunger. Similarly, the recent financial crisis has revealed that a company's bottom line isn't necessarily proportional to it's positive impact on the world. Money is an invaluable abstraction, but it's good to sometimes take a step back and think about the millions of moving parts involved when you buy a pack of gum from the store.

How To Teach Machines Creativity

2010-05-12T21:33:00.004-04:00

Kasparov said of Deep Blue, after losing to it at chess, that he sometimes "saw deep intelligence and creativity in the machine's moves." Partially, this was an accusation that the IBM programmers weren't playing fairly, but it was fundamentally a testament to the quality of play Deep Blue could bring to chess.

Of course, it wasn't really exhibiting creativity. The biggest advantage a chess playing computer has is simply the depth it can think ahead. It chose its moves because it knew they'd prevent Kasparov from checkmating it in the foreseeable future, not from any deep insight into the strategies of the board.

I heard another anecdote from a professor, once, about an experiment in robotic movement. A (computer) mouse was tied to the back of a small, roomba like robot. The goal was to train it to avoid walls. Whenever the mouse rolled forward, the robot would get a 'reward'. Whenever it rolled backwards, it would be 'penalized'. These were just numbers being plugged into an algorithm, but they acted analogously to the dopamine in your brain. The robot was supposed to learn to navigate in such a way that it wouldn't have to back up, something like traveling in a circle through the room. The researchers left the robot running overnight to learn.

When they returned the next morning they were surprised to find the robot in a corner, rocking back and forth. Not the expected result. Some investigation revealed that the robot had found its way onto a rug. Whenever it moved backwards, the rug's bristles would jam up the mouse wheel. It had freedom to roll in the other direction, however. The rug let it avoid the negative feedback, circumventing the expected rules and giving it a constant euphoria as it rocked back and forth in place.

The solution seems creative. Really, though, it was just dumb luck. The robot didn't reason out that the rug might help, it blindly ended up on the rug, where it happened to take a couple simple steps that seemed positive. It tried a few repetitions, decided this was the best it was going to find, and went with it.

So how could we incorporate a more 'real' form of creativity into AI? I believe it's all about explicitly measuring creativity. Big Blue was 'rewarded' based on victories and losses. The robot was rewarded for moving forward. To create a creative machine, you have to reward creativity.

Let's use music as an example. What if we wanted to train a computer to compose music? First: a quick machine learning lesson:

Genetic Algorithms evolve a solution to a problem. For the music example, you'd take thousands of completely random musical scores, and listen to them (or ideally, evaluate them mathematically to start). They'd all sound bad, but hopefully a couple have some redeeming feature: a rhythm, or some short snippet that sounded good. After ordering them by quality, you take the best and create a new generation, just like life does. There's a few mutations thrown in (changing notes), but mostly you use genetic crossover: take two of the musical scores, cut them up and interleave them.

If you repeat this, generation after generation, the quality of the music will increase. Short snippets of good music greatly increase the odds an individual song will pass its genetic (musical?) material to the next generation, so those good snippets grow in number. Eventually music evolves.

But of course, this isn't creative. You end up with a population of songs at the end that all sound alike, as they all share most of their genetic material now. The process is creative like evolution is creative (are animals art?) but you don't have an artificial mind that can create arbitrary songs.

So we turn our attention to genetic programming. This still uses the same life-based mechanisms to evolve a population, but now you're evolving a population of computer programs. You write random computer programs, in this case programs that take some input and output a song. At first none of the computer programs do what you want (or anything, usually. Random code isn't terribly useful), but evolution still kicks in. With a large enough population, enough generations, and somebody listening to the god-awful racket this would produce, you'd eventually end up with a computer composer. Would it be creative?

Probably not. My prediction is that while the eventual eComposer would produce passable music, it would be very self-derivative. Once it finds a formula that works, why deviate? Deviating from your best stuff is only likely to get you a lower evaluation, and then you don't get any children. Best to play it safe, keep pumping out the same bass line, and keep your bytes replicating.

So what do you do? You evaluate each composer not just on quality, but on their creativity. You don't just ask for their best piece, you ask for 10 pieces, and make sure they're all good enough and different enough from each other. We usually only care about the best answer from our machine buddies, but I think that's wrong. To be right consistently, to be right when things change dramatically, you need to be able to come up with lots of different candidate solutions. It seems obvious in terms of music, but I expect this would help in lots of different machine learning domains.

Were I at grad-school, I'd write a paper about this. I'd throw together some simple problems, and see how penalizing for lack of depth in suggested solutions changes the long term performance of GP-produced programs. I'd draw some graphs, write up a conclusion suggesting further research, and find some journal to print it. But instead, not being a grad student, I've decided to publish the idea (sans research) via blog. When/If I do end up back in school, I can look back at my blog and start pumping out the papers. Or alternatively, Internet, you're welcome to do the work and take the credit if you find this first. Especially if you're a robot reading this as you consume all of humanity's written word (I'm looking at you, Google)...

Am I You?

2010-05-06T22:22:00.004-04:00

A very early memory of mine is staring, head back, up at a tree. I remember, in a fuzzy way, the dichotomy between the details in each minutely detailed leaf, and the whole, indivisible mass of green. I was being babysat by an aunt; my cousin was in his room for some transgression. I think it was summer: I remembered being impressed by the warmth and beauty around me.

It's not a remarkable memory for the vista, I've seen that tree hundreds of times. Rather, it stayed with me because it was the first time my mind stumbled across a mystery that's been with me ever since. I was outside, observing manicured nature. My cousin was in his room, probably fuming at his mother. But why was my experience of the world the one looking at the tree? My cousin must certainly have this same first-person experience, feeling one individual's pain, beholding one individual's sight. I knew I was me, it's basically a tautology. I didn't doubt I was the individual named Paul Barba, but it felt so arbitrary that I shouldn't be my cousin, or my neighbor, or any of 6 billion other individuals.

It's a hard question to ask, because there's a simple question obscuring a deeper one. I am me, because I have to be somebody. That's just how the world works: each person is an individual. There's no explanation necessary, and any perceived asymmetry is just a lack of perspective on my part. But at the same time, the huge divide between Paul's experiences and everyone else's, from my point of view, was troubling as a child.

Ultimately, I think the question is one of consciousness. That was the asymmetry in the world I was detecting, but too young to really understand. Everything else is physical. My cousin, the tree: they were all physical objects describable with reference to atomic patterns. But what about this perception of the world I had? This self-understanding mind, conscious of the passage of time around it? We still don't know how to understand it, really, in terms of electrons and photons. Maybe it's the work of a soul. Maybe solipism is truth, and there is a fundamental divide between me and everyone else. But I'm inclined to believe it's ultimately a matter of matter and energy.

I was Paul at age 7. I'm Paul now, and if it's meant to be I'll be Paul 50 years hence. There's this continuous stream of awareness that links the experiences of that child staring at a tree with the young adult typing on a laptop. I don't doubt that I was experiencing that tree.

But so much has changed: my brain has grown and reformed its patterns since then. Neuroplasticity tells us that the patterns in our brain are constantly changing. Most of my cells have died since then, being replaced by new generations. With twins, you could have argued that twin brothers at 7 are more similar than the 7 year old version and the 40 year old version of the same person. But the 40 year old and the 7 year old share a linked experience of being one person...

Which leads me to believe that it's just the uninterrupted existence of Paul that leads me to connect my current experiences with that child's experiences. I've got memories, but those aren't the same as a real experience. 7 Year old Paul experienced consciousness, 24 year old Paul is experiencing consciousness: everybody is. Memories, opinions, the chemicals rushing past our neurons are just incidentals. My perception of me, my intelligence and opinions, is less fundamental then this experiencing of looking out of two eyes: that's what I relate to as me, more deeply then the realities of a single moment.

Which all, ultimately, leads me to believe that what I would most deeply connect to as myself, the core of being, that thing experiencing emotions and visions and the pinch of the cheeks during a smile and the wind blowing through your hair: that wasn't limited to the boy looking at a tree. Whatever natural phenomenon leads me to perceive the world instead of blindly reacting to physical laws is at work in everybody. Thus while at one level I am Paul, I also believe I'm everyone else, everyone who will exist, at least until humanity dies off or evolves past my experiences. It doesn't feel true, at a level. I still feel, and am, closed off from every other experience. But that division of the world into individual pockets of consciousness doesn't mean they aren't all, in an important way, the same. When I die, these thoughts will be gone, these experiences forgotten, but experiencing and thinking will persist. What I thought was my own first-person experience will continue peering out some billions of pairs of eyes.

A Few Thoughts on Creating

2010-05-02T17:44:00.003-04:00

I find it much easier to start a project than to see it through. I don't think anybody maintains enthusiasm through the whole of a large undertaking, but it seems to be my shortcoming more than many. It's got to have something to do with my preference for ideas: I like the new. I like working out the interactions in a complex system. I like mapping a story arc, or drawing a mock-up. Once that part is done, though, and it's time to turn ideas into realities, I start losing focus. The siren songs of new ideas beckon.

Hence two weeks without a new post.

It's easy to be productive when you've got the enthusiasm for it. Some blog posts stream effortlessly through my fingers and into the electronic aether. But sometimes it has to be forced out. It's a phenomena I don't really understand. It's easy to run out of creative juices in any activity. Sometimes you just stare at a blank sheet of paper, or type away at code despite your brain pleading for television or a walk. Getting away from it, playing a video game or reading a book can help. But consuming media just as often leaves me more lethargic and uninterested than ever.

I feel obligated to create things in a way I don't exactly understand. Having a talent feels like an injunction to use it. The ephemeral nature of life pushes and pulls in this: in the brief time I have on Earth, shouldn't I do something impressive with it? But at the same time another voice asks: with the brief time I have, shouldn't I be enjoying life?

Which is perhaps the core of it: creative activities should be enjoyable. The brain is a massively parallel machine that makes countless evaluations in the process of creating. What topics to move on to? Which to cut? What's the most effective placement of the object in a sentence? Are there too many adverbs? But without enthusiasm, threads of the brain get distracted or quiet. Less brain mass is focused on the creation, and the creation suffers for it. And it seems that maintaining this divided attention, the conscious realm pushing out sentences but the unconscious dallying on other topics, drains us.

My brain is grasping for a concluding idea, something to wrap this all up, some larger context these thoughts have fit into. But there isn't anything obvious coming to mind. Creating is hard. Motivation is hard. Thinking about either too deeply gets into weird existential questions that haven't ever been very helpful to me in creating the motivation. But perhaps the key is that while the creative tides ebb, they rise as well. My motivation for blogging, for writing, for programming have all been weak lately, but that's just one phase in a larger creative cycle. I'm blogging again, after all.

Thou Shalt Not Infringe Intellectual Properties

2010-04-18T13:10:00.003-04:00

I was at the Lupa Zoo last weekend, which was a lot of fun. It's always a pleasure to see and feed exotic animals. Stationed throughout the zoo were boxes with bags of peanuts and crackers. There was a little sign asking for $2 or $5 (depending on size), and informing us "Don't Steal." The honor system was at work.

What's interesting to me is that the food was ultimately destined for the animal's bellies, whether via my hand or some employee's. In a sense, we weren't buying the physical food, we were buying the experience of feeding the animals. The gift shop wasn't based on the honor system: there would be an actual, real expense to stealing a stuffed animal. The profit from the feed bags certainly helps keep the zoo going, but if an individual stole a bag who wouldn't have purchased one otherwise, the zoo doesn't really lose anything.

These economics are the same as noncommercial copyright violations (AKA piracy). And seeing the parallels has really convinced me that the honor system is best in both situations. The new Intellectual Property Czar had a request for comments recently, and the media industries weighed in with their hopes for our future: censorship of the Internet, spyware on our computers to detect any unethical behavior, federal cops enforcing these edicts. Free wifi spots will be a thing of the past. Youtube may be as well. For one thing, this opens us up for abuses (will the ability to freely spy on everything any American does with his computer be limited to downloading music? Australian censorship is already being used to prevent access to any information about euthanasia). But even if you trust our government, it legitimizes the actions of nations like Iran and China, who use this sort of information to capture and torture human rights activists.

Groups like the RIAA and MPAA like to present our options as either accepting censorship and surveillance, or just letting our entertainment industries die. But the idea that laws are the only way to influence behavior is a scary one. If I hadn't paid for the bag of feed, I wouldn't have been fined $2 million. I've just been taught stealing is wrong, absent laws. Cigarette's are a bad choice, but we let people make that choice. Plenty feel premarital sex, or at the very least adultery, are wrong, but we don't punish either of those with fines or jail time. Adultery in particular seems far more hurtful to another human being then downloading music, but we don't legislate against it. Why?

Because we previously understood that it isn't the courts role to dish out vengeance for every little wrong. Especially when an action occurs between two consenting adults (as piracy does), the violations to our freedoms necessary to enforce the law are far too burdensome to be worthwhile. Instead, we have another tactic: we teach children the difference between right and wrong. How about instead of spying, censorship and lawsuits, we just teach our children how buying things lets the producers keep producing? And if the occasional free loader declines, or if a family struggling to feed themselves takes a movie they couldn't afford, or we download a movie because our original dvd has broken, who cares? Of the ten commandments, I only count three we legislate. Do business models deserve a place above the ten commandments?

I recommend we all acknowledge piracy is bad, and then give up on the hunt to eradicate it from the earth.

The iPhone: A Programmer's View

2010-04-11T12:28:00.003-04:00

Apple has been in the news a lot lately with the release of the iPad, details of the next iteration of the iPhone OS, a patent lawsuit against HTC, and some notable changes to their developer agreements. Right now, they dominate the tablet and computer-like smart-phone market, and it looks like they're trying to get away with the same sort of behavior Microsoft pulled against them. Unfortunately I think they've learned the wrong lessons. The OS industry in the 1980's didn't have the depth of competition the smart-phone market has today. The line between phones, tablets and computers is blurring, which will make it harder to monopolize any one domain. And Microsoft succeeded in its bullying because it had buy-in from two crucial groups: the consumer, and the developer. Apple is doing well with the former, but antagonizing the latter.

Windows has over 90% market-share and has done even better in the past. Why? A large part of it is applications. Almost any piece of software you can find will run on Windows. If you like video games, or need a particular piece of business software, Windows will run it. Cross platform development has improved recently, but even today you'll find many more windows exclusives then any other system.

So the consumers go where the software is, and that in turn drives the programmers to support Windows. With 90% of the market, your software doesn't stand much chance if it won't run on Windows. You end up with a feedback loop: consumers go where the apps are, the apps are written for the OS the consumer uses. If you cut either side, you're in danger. For all its failings, Microsoft did well enough keeping the consumer content, and did an excellent job of giving developers what they wanted.

Microsoft packaged QBasic with Windows until recently, which was my first exposure to programming. They've developed one of the best development environments out there, and give out a fully-functional free version. You can write software for windows without spending a penny, and Microsoft demands no licensing fees for you to sell it.

Contrast this with Apple. To release an iPhone application you need to pay $99 up front, then give Apple a cut of your profits. After a great deal of effort producing the application, Apple needs to approve it, and there are many tales on the internet of benign apps getting rejected. If Apple doesn't like it for any reason, your development effort is sunk. While you can program in literally hundreds of languages for Windows (or even write your own), Apple now restricts you to 3.

When Apple rejected Flash on the iPhone/iPad, I was surprised. But the action was understandable: Flash would be a hole in the App Store model: another way of distributing content without Apple's approval or (more cynically) without Apple getting its cut. Adobe responded as many other programming languages have: by writing a compiler that turns flash code into iPhone code. You program in a human-readable, high level language. A compiler turns this into 1's and 0's the computer can read. Each operating system has its own dialect of 1's and 0's, but there's no reason you can't compile into any of them. This seemed like a reasonable solution: the apps would now be indistinguishable from any other app. They would go through Apple's store, through its approval process, and Apple would get its cut. Because the 1's and 0's are essentially the same no matter what the original language they were written in, there would no longer be any obvious difference between a flash app and a c app.

Apple has said no. The latest iteration of the agreement developers need to sign to write for the iPhone or iPad has been updated: you must write your programs in c, c++ or objective-c. Objective-c, born in 1986, is used extensively in Macs and iPhones, but nowhere else. C, born in 1972, was once all the rage but is rather out of date now. It's still used, but not frequently. C++, born 1979 is a very popular (but complicated) language. The youngest is as old as me, and these represent just a small spectrum of the language paradigms that exist. Most programmers have some language they like best, and its usually not any of these anymore. These are all slow languages to develop in: newer ones let you produce working code much faster. And given all the existing software already in existence in another language, there are lots of programs that could have easily been ported to the iPad, but now won't be.

The idea is to force developers to commit exclusively to the Apple universe. With a modern language you could easily develop for every major smartphone and every major tablet at once. Apple seems to hope that by taking away these cross platform choices, developers will give up on the Android, or Windows, and build iPhone exclusives. But I highly doubt that'll happen, at least not with the sort of developers you want to attract. By taking away languages programmers want to write in, by taking away the ability to easily port something you wrote for Windows to the iPad, and by all the other anti-developer actions Apple has taken, I suspect most will just write for something else. Apple has gotten consumer buy-in, but if the developers leave, the consumers will too. Will you still want an iPhone if nobody's writing apps for it? Apple's throwing its weight around because it has an early lead, which worked well for Microsoft. But Microsoft never used its development community as fodder for its corporate battles.

Perhaps times have changed. Perhaps there are enough developers out there that you can push away most of the community and still have all the software you need. As programs continue migrating into web-apps, maybe the battle over natively running apps will stop mattering so much. But I've got a feeling pundits will be pointing at this action in the years to come as the moment the iPhone jumped the shark.

That's no space station...it's a moon!

2010-04-03T12:23:00.003-04:00

I posted previously about a future energy source: solar panels in space. Without an atmosphere to get in the way, and without that whole "day and night" thing, solar panels can absorb easily 300% of the energy they would on Earth. Because the energy would be constant, we could avoid having to build wasteful methods of preserving energy for night or cloudy days. Overall, its a very promising technology.

But there are downsides: specifically, cost. Shooting things into space is not cheap. The best figure I could find puts bringing a US ton of matter into space at just under $10m. That would decline if we sent more things into space: it's far more expensive to build individual shuttles then to mass produce the launching mechanisms. But even at a quarter the cost, the economics of these space panels is questionable. You might not get as much sunlight on Earth, but space travel is a pricey proposition. Thus while these space panels may someday form a viable energy source, we're probably not ready yet.

But there's a better option, I've realized. Space solar panels work so well because of the lack of an atmosphere: well, the moon lacks one as well. Solar panels are usually constructed of silicon, which turns out to be the second most prevalent element in the moon's crust. Instead of building solar panels here on Earth and tossing them out of our gravity well, we could just construct the solar panels on the moon. This turns it from a question of cheap space travel to a question of extraterrestrial construction. Any complicated machinery would be constructed here on Earth, then rocketed to the moon. There, cousins of the Mars Rover would shovel moon dust into little self contained factories. Solar Panels would come out, be laid in grids across the lunar surface, and hooked up to a microwave generator that would beam plentiful energy back to Earth. We'd have to keep sending new robots and factories as they break (at least in the short term), but besides that the solar panel fields could grow and grow and grow. Plentiful energy for all!

And it would, I suspect, have to be for all. Space is one thing, but moon-based construction is going to be a thorny political issue. Who owns the land on the moon? The first person to start using it? And would it be rational for America (if we're the ones building the Lunar Solar Fields) to switch to a pure solar energy society while China continues burning coal? No, I suspect it makes far more sense to get everybody over to to this climate friendly energy source as soon as possible. It would require an unprecedented degree of global cooperation, which worries me. But if we could find an agreeable way to distribute the energy we could move over to a vastly more environmentally friendly energy source in the very near future. It's a tricky engineering problem: constructing factories in an inhospitable environment with minimal direct human interaction, but its not something that strikes me as beyond our current means. It shouldn't require terribly advanced robotics, or major advances in solar panel construction. Someday you may look up at the moon and see a little splotch of black, and in the following decades that black would grow until our great grandchildren look up at the sky and can dimly make out a great spherical solar panel, orbiting the planet, providing energy more plentiful then anything we've ever known.

Bangs, Bounces, Freezes, Crunches

2010-03-15T21:23:00.005-04:00

The fabric of space-time is expanding in every direction. All the stars in the night sky are receding from our view: the more distant the star, the faster the retreat. Someday the night sky will be black, as even the closest star (if any still burn on) is racing away faster than the light that brings us its news. This is not a violation of Einstein's prohibition against moving faster than light: that rule only applies to matter and energy, not to space-time itself.

What's going on? Empty space is growing around us. I've written about this before, using the analogy of a universe on a ripple spreading out across a pond. Physicists aren't sure what's causing the expansion of the universe, so they give it the mysterious moniker "dark energy". If there really are mysterious bearers of this force, dark-trons you might call them, they account for 74% of the energy/mass in the universe.

Physicists used to believe in a Big Crunch (some still do, I'm sure) where the Universe gets pulled back together into a point, a reverse Big Bang. This lead naturally to the Big Bounce theory, where immediately after the Big Crunch you've got a new Big Bang. The universe would cycle endlessly (although possibly slowly winding down...), life would begin again and again and again.

I recall wondering about this as a child, and what it meant for humanity's future. It seemed to mark a fixed end to our days. No matter how successful our civilization is, no matter how many star systems we colonize, it would face extinction in the Big Crunch. Sure, a new universe might spring to life, but how could we get there? You can't outrun space shrinking, as there's nowhere else to run to. There could be hope, retreating out of space time for a few million years, but such a task would require entirely unknown laws of physics. From a relativistic standpoint we're doomed in the Big Crunch model.

But then physicists observed that not only is the universe expanding, it's expanding at an ever accelerating rate. It shows no sign of pulling back in for a Big Crunch. So another theory for the end of days took center stage: The Big Freeze. In an expanding Universe, there is increasingly less and less energy per unit volume. Someday a single photon zipping across an empty expanse that once housed our solar system would be an usually warm region of the Universe. Again, not much hope for mankind: this story doesn't end with perpetual rebirths of the Universe we could hitch a ride onto: it ends with order decaying into a vast expanse of nothingness.

So humanity must die. If it comforts you, we're probably talking billions of years of time. And anyways, worrying about humanity's end in terms of the universe's death is a bit like declining desert on the Titanic...but then, there's another theory worth considering...

String Theory has given rise to mathematical models that suggest our universe may not be all there is. In these physical theories, we live on a brane (derived from membrane), a self contained universe floating in a larger reality. Reusing the metaphor from an earlier post, we would be analogous to a civilization living on a ripple in a lake. There are other ripples, there may even be other lakes. Spacetime would be a material we live on, but the energy for the Big Bang would have come from a collision with another sheet of reality.

And suddenly, there's hope again. If space is large enough, it may contain many separate universes, different realities created by different big bangs. These would be unimaginably far away, but if you sit in your spaceship for sufficient aeons you could visit. And even if there's just one, given enough time a new collision will occur: Really, this could happen at any moment. You never know when the space around you is suddenly going to erupt with the energy of trillions of suns. It's amazing how successful physics is at introducing new things for us to worry about (quantum vacuum collapse is a fun one for its combination of utter devastation and quantum weirdness).

So what's this all mean for us? If we can survive sufficiently long in the big freeze, and then survive a universe being born around us, we can keep going as a civilization indefinitely. It seems like a harsh journey for our bodies, but if we programmed the patterns of our DNA into stronger matter it could recreate us once the new universe is born and grown up into a more hospitable place. Ideally nanobots would survive a high energy wave as the new universe passes over them, but if that won't work we could leave patterns of energy to get swept up in the new universe. These would interact at a quantum level with the new matter, so it evolves in a pattern we wished, eventually recreating some simple robot tasked with rebuilding humanity.

As our understanding of physics improves I'll keep you up to date, but the current prognosis is that an eternal civilization is possible (however catastrophically unlikely).

Stone, Bronze, Iron, Steel...

2010-03-10T21:45:00.003-05:00

I find it interesting that we use materials to name the earlier reaches of time: The iron age, the bronze age... Plenty of other variables could be used to divide history, but the materials used to build technology are a very significant, and in particular visible, choice. What would you call the current age? We once went by the Nuclear Age, but that was far from a revolutionary change. Nuclear energy is just another power source, anonymous through our electric grid. Perhaps fission will deserve an age, driving us across the galaxy, but that's all the future.

Nuclear points the way to electricity, and the selection of the Electronic Age feels appropriate. That ephemeral bolt of energy, so recently understood, is a nice nod to the unprecedented growth in scientific knowledge we've seen. Plentiful power, shipped all across the landscape, revolutionized life as fully as anything since agriculture. It's been transforming us since the later acts of the Industrial Revolution, now getting a second run at revolution with the advent of computers and the Internet.

If this is the Electronic Age, what comes next? I suspect an appropriate name will be the Carbon Age, when that plentiful element bends to our whim. After as fundamental a character as the electron, it does feel like a step backwards to move up in size to element, but what can be done? The quark, the gluon, the photon: they're such wispy, enigmatic things. No, Carbon is my candidate, bridging the gap between the macro and the micro-scale.

For one thing, there's this structure, the carbon nanotube:

Carbon Nanotube Image found on Flickr

Unroll it and you've got graphene; these materials have pretty unbelievable properties. If you want to build an elevator to outer-space, the carbon nanotube is just about your only option for the tether. And it now looks like it's going to have a role powering nanotechnology. Researches coated carbon nanotubes in explosives, then ignited one end. While an explosion normally radiates energy in all directions, the nanotube caught the heat and channeled it down its length. The first cool thing that happened was the heat, moving uni-directionally, traversed the nanotube 10,000 times faster than in a regular explosion. From our old friend F=MA, a faster explosion is a more powerful explosion.

On it's own, this would be pretty cool and useful. But something else happened: This wave of heat managed to catch hold of the electrons in the nanotube. You could visualize the electrons as buoys floating in the ocean: waves pass them by and they bob up and down in place. But if a large enough wave (a tidal wave, perhaps) were to flow past, the buoys would get caught up in the motion and wash away. It turns out this heat wave did just that, driving the electrons out the other end of the nanotube. This was something scientists didn't expect could happen. The explosive coated nanotube generated about 100 times the electricity of a battery, by weight. Additionally, while a battery slowly loses energy as it sits unused, there's no obvious reason the nanotube couldn't hold on to its electrical potential for decades if not millenia.

The downside is that the nanotube is not easily reusable like a battery: to generate more energy a new coating of explosives would need to be applied (or potentially pumped into the nanotube as a gas). It's also not clear whether you could scale this up to say, power your house. But we've already got solutions for powering the macroscopic world: this breakthrough is revolutionary for what it could allow in the microscopic realm. Traditional engines do not scale well downwards. Being able to generate electricity at the atomic scale is the first step to being able to construct things on the atomic scale: another small step towards nanobots. Being able to instruct agents to work on the atomic scale could be the key to revolutionizing manufacture, scanning and understanding our brain, stopping cancer and heart attacks, and even colonizing space. Carbon is a great building block, easy to structure into all different shapes, and will likely play a major role in future miniaturization.

Which is half of why I believe the next age will be the Carbon Age. The other reason is a nod to our status as carbon-based lifeforms. Our understanding of DNA continues to grow, and the technology to read and manipulate genes is plummeting in price. Scientists are already starting to custom build bacteria, you may fill your car with gasoline derived from oil that a custom build bacteria produced. If we can bend life itself to our whim, creating never before seen creations to serve our needs, we'll have entered a new phase of futurism in human evolution. This is a topic I'll revisit in more depth later.

Goodbye Electronic Age, hello Carbon Age.

The Limits of Knowledge, Part IV

2010-03-08T18:31:00.005-05:00

Continued from
(Part I - Introduction)
(Part II - Paradoxes in Math)
(Part III - Turns out you can't do anything about the paradoxes)

Alan Turing (1912 - 1954)

Last time I blogged on this topic, I discussed Kurt Gödel's proof no consistent mathematical system of more than trivial complexity can be complete, or more concisely: Math is filled with an infinity of paradoxes. This turns out to have some important implications for Computer Science. Although we usually think about computers in term of real life engineered machinery, they're also creatures of mathematics. Just like integers, or particular sets of numbers, you can write proofs about computers. One of the most important minds in formalizing and reasoning about computers in the abstract was Alan Turing: inventor of the Turing Machine, Turing test, and important contributor to the cracking of the Enigma Code.

Turing reasoned about a computer that's come to be known as a Turing Machine. It's a rather impractical device, consisting of a machine that reads and writes symbols to a long strip of paper. You program the machine by telling it what action to take when it sees a symbol; for example: if you read the letter 'a', replace it with a 'b' and slide the tape one symbol backwards. Interestingly, anything you can program the computer you're reading this blog post on to do you could program with a Turing machine. Google or Windows 7 could be run on a Turing machine. It may take decades to get a result out, but that's not important in theory. The computational power, the programs you could write, are the same.

Turing equivalent machines are the most powerful ones we know of, likely the most powerful possible. Computers built to take advantage of weird quantum rules could be simulated in a Turing machine. Our brains can probably be simulated in a Turing machine. In fact, it's hypothesized that the whole universe could be simulated in a Turing machine, a hypothesis I'd give lots of credence. None of this is practical: our universe might die and get reborn trillions of times while you wait for the program to complete, but the interesting point is it would eventually complete.

Which brings us to again to the limits of knowledge. If there are questions the Turing machine could not possibly answer, then that's it for the question. There's no reason to believe humans could figure out the answer, or that even the universe acting as one giant brain could solve. And there are such questions. And they aren't even that complicated.

consider the following program:
while(x > 3) x = x+1
print(x);

that says that for any input x, keep adding 1 to x until it's less than 3, then print the number. So if you enter 2 it would print out 2. What if you run it on 4? Well, 4 > 3, so we go again with 5. Then 6. Then 7. The number keeps getting larger: it'll never be smaller than 3. Your computer will think and think and think and never return an answer. This is often what's happened when a program you're running freezes up. It's easy to see that making a number bigger and bigger when really you need it to be smaller just isn't going to work. This program doesn't "halt".

Given an arbitrary program and its input, can we figure out if it's going to halt? Imagine if we had a program that does this: Then we could build another program that does the opposite of its input. You give it a halting program and it runs forever. You give it a program that runs forever and it halts. What would it do if you passed in its own source code? It would run forever if it halts...but if it halts, that means it must run forever...but wait, it halted...No matter how it acts, it's by definition doing the wrong thing. Thus a program that figures out if any other program halts on some input cannot logically exist (see here for a fuller explanation of the proof). As you can see, this is a very similiar problem to Russel's paradox that was the seed for understanding that math is incomplete. Computer Science is part of math, and follows the same rules as the rest of it.

Alan Turing was a hugely influential man in Computer Science. Besides that, in playing an important role in breaking Germany's secret codes, he was among the most important men in winning World War II. How did the U.K. thank him for his contributions to science and national security? In 1952 he fell afoul of 'gross indecency' laws that outlawed homosexuality and was given the choice of imprisonment or probation conditional on taking chemicals to reduce his libido (they also caused him to grow breasts). His security clearances were revoked and he was barred from continuing his cryptographic work. In 1954 he took his own life, eating a cyanide laced apple. In 2009 Gordan Brown apologized for his nation's treatment of Turing.

Turing Photo distributed under Creative Commons

Patently Silly

2010-03-03T19:05:00.002-05:00

If you follow tech news you already know this, but if not: Apple is suing HTC (maker of various Google Android phones) for patent infringement. Twenty Patents are named in the lawsuit (Engadget has a discussion of what each means). Naturally, the blogosphere is abuzz with discussions of what this means for HTC, Apple, and Google.

In short, while HTC is the defendant, conventional wisdom states the suit is more about Google then anything else. The iPhone is the current dominant smartphone, but Google's efforts are gaining steam and may eventually unseat Apple's reigning champ. The patents cover a lot of ground, but the basic point of contention is touch based control of a phone (specifically, multitouch). Why HTC? It's a major producer of Google's Android phones, and it probably doesn't own enough patents of its own to launch a counterattack. It may be the first in a series of lawsuits, or this might be it.

In older news, Apple is also the defendant in patent lawsuits: Nokia has filed suit that the iPhone violates 10 of its own patents. Apple counter-sued in that case with its own patents, and the case has yet to be resolved.

Which brings us to the interesting use of patents in the tech industry. HTC, by failing to patent sufficient quantities of ideas, has left itself vulnerable in a bizarre game being played by major companies. Many seemingly obvious ideas have been patented (one of the patents being brought by Apple is for using gestures to unlock a phone. Another is for having a screen scroll when you wave your finger and 'bounce' when it hits the bottom. A famous software patent is Amazon's 'one click' method for being able to purchase a product from a webpage without re-entering shipping and billing information). The major technology companies have accrued impressive quantities of patents.

Some software patents are used by 'patent trolls' who aren't trying to defend any product, just extort money from other companies. The big companies tend to use there patent portfolio's not for lawsuits but as a deterrent. When Nokia sued Apple for violating its patents on crucial cellphone technology, Apple counter-sued with its own basic patents Nokia was likely to be violating. If two major companies got in a serious patent war (IBM vs. GE, or Apple vs. Microsoft), the results could be catastrophic. Huge swathes of products could be expelled from the market. It's probably impossible to have any cell phones without some cross licensing: a 'world war' of patents would eliminate entire product classes, some as fundamental as the operating system. It's generally believed that companies are too self-interested to actually let such a ominous situation arise, but to be fair a similar sentiment existed before World War I.

While patents were designed to promote innovation, they seem to be having the opposite effect in software. Hence some major efforts to reform or eliminate software patents (see in particular 'in re Bilski'). Understanding a piece of software can require expertise in the field and days of time, neither of which the average patent examiner has. Additionally, software is much closer to the realm of ideas: it's much easier to describe an idea for a program than a way of, say, fighting AIDs. Which is not to say that there isn't important research that needs to be funded in software: there is. Microsoft, to pick a specific example, has an extremely well regarded research department they pump lots of money in to. But the problems I mentioned earlier, along with the rapid pace of change inherent in technology, has created an environment of weaponized patents. Besides creating costs in fighting off patent trolls and removing useful products from the market, the threat of a patent war that takes out how product categories exists.

The problem is ultimately the one-size-fits-all nature of patents. I'm by no means opposed to patents, but the dynamics of software is totally different from the dynamics of pharmaceuticals. Whereas drugs can take hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, a software patent can be thought up in an afternoon. Whereas drugs are patented individually, software is made up of tens of thousands of algorithms working together, any one of which is subject to patent. And none of that takes in to account the speed of advance in software. If search had been patented, 2010 could be the first year we'd be able to use anything but good old Archie (sorry Google).

The problem with these articles on complex topics like patent law is that they're hard to conclude. What to say? The software industry would probably be stronger without any patents, but that's by no means a certainty. And more nuanced solutions would require additional pages to discuss. The one positive is that 20 years isn't a terribly long time (compare with copyright, which if congress continues to lengthen at the rate is has goes on forever). Yes many software patents are questionable, not to mention the patents on your genes (that's right, someone owns a couple of those), but at least in 20 years they expire and no-one can copyright them anymore. At least we'll have a free market eventually.

Complaining on the Internet

2010-02-27T13:05:00.004-05:00

I posted recently about online businesses that have two phases: growing very popular but not profitable, and then converting the popularity into profit. It's arguably not the best business model: a sustainable income stream is generally preferable to a one time windfall, but it may allow online for-profit work that couldn't otherwise support itself.

In the comments, Meredith pointed us to Heather Armstrong's problems with Maytag. To recap, an influential 'Mommy Blogger' purchased a new washing machine that promptly broke, and was given the run around by repairmen and customer service reps. By taking her complaints into the public sphere her washing machine was promptly fixed, and another machine was donated to a shelter.

Heather Armstrong has a lot of sway in an important market segment, but the threat of bad online publicity isn't just being wielded by the twitterati. Comcast has a full time employee tasked with resolving any issues people bring up with its service on twitter. Various airlines do the same, with people reporting significantly better customer service by tweeting rather than talking directly to a representative. A complaint going viral (as happened in 2006 when a blogger recorded an AOL rep trying to prevent him from canceling his account) can cause serious damage to a company's reputation, so many are going to great lengths to avoid this.

This is a significant shift in power that should hopefully curb the worst abuses of corporations. Indeed, the power of the internet to communicate complaints to all corners of the globe is being used not just against corporations but against governments, educators and individuals who abuse their roles. The potential exists here to greatly enhance the transparency of the world, and to use the power of the masses to counterbalance localized power abuses.

But one needs only look at customer opinion aggregation services to realize that like everything else on the internet, there's a dark side. I googled "fake amazon reviews" to find something to link to, but the 1,000,000 hits speaks for itself (an aside: I find it interesting that Google-owned Blogger doesn't recognize 'googled' as a valid word). Companies post rave reviews of their products (sometimes a great many), and more sinisterly make up complaints and accusations against competitors. More than one business has been accused of extortion, Yelp being the most recent to face a class action lawsuit. Purportedly the company offered to take down negative reviews if a company would advertise with them, or conversely threaten to take down positive reviews. Any credible claim can influence corporate actions and consumer choices, not just true statements.

And while companies feel like fair targets, online complaints are also entwined with internet vigilantism. A Korean girl became the subject of abuse, eventually dropping out school, after she was filmed failing to clean up her dog's poop. Between misinformation and abusive use of correct information, it's not clear whether the soapbox of the internet is revealing truths about companies we otherwise would have missed, or if its muddying the water and making it increasingly difficult to understand the truth about a situation.

Perhaps worst of all is that the technology for automating the vocalization of opinions is continually being refined. As it currently stands, writing up fake reviews takes time. Many sites fight abuses by discounting users who post only a single opinion, or post rave reviews for every one of a company's product. Creating enough accounts, seeding with enough real reviews (over a reasonable span of time), and changing each review enough to hide that you wrote them all is work. But software could do it for you someday. Already a great many blogs exist that just use software to rewrite other people's posts.

I suspect we'll manage, though. Paid reviews and payola have a long history, and society has managed. Using reviews as extortion is starting to generate lawsuits, and I suspect over time the worst abuses will subside. More than anything, the internet is just a reflection of society, and the same critical evaluation required for interacting with the world is necessary online. It's not so much that the internet is unleashing new evils on the world, as its proving incapable of defeating the same old evils we're used to.

When the wells run dry

2010-02-25T19:26:00.003-05:00

I saw a commercial for the natural gas industry that discussed all the great things natural gas does. As an industry, it employs x million people. It's used to power our homes, run our factories, and produce our drugs and plastics. After discussing all the cool things gas can be used for, a pretty woman tells the audience to remember all the great benefits next time a natural gas pocket is found and drilled. I think the idea was that rather than worry about the environment, consider the positives of exploiting this resource.

But for whatever reason I found myself visualizing an alternative version of the commercial, where instead of saying "hey, isn't it great we can make drugs and fertilizer out of hydrocarbons?" the woman was instead reminding me of the products our grandchildren are going to have trouble creating. "Remember when we didn't have to turn food stuffs into hydrocarbons and then into drugs, but could instead eat our food and drill for our drugs? Look at how warm that house is! It's burning material built up over millions of years and consumed in a couple centuries! Next time a natural gas pocket is found and drilled, think of all the future generations who won't get a chance to use this easy source of energy."

I've always felt like economic theory fails to address the future. There's plenty of arguments for how to fairly allocate resources, but they always seem to deal with the current generation. "If we can pump 80 million barrels of oil a day, how should we distribute that energy between each nation?" But what about conserving it for another generation? Even if we reject the socialist idea that everybody deserves equal resources, how can using up a resource before someone's born be meritocratic? The market can't account for people and usages that don't exist at the moment.

One argument is that in the long run any non-renewable resource is unsustainable, so there's no morale imperative to share the windfall: if we're careful we could make easily accessible oil last 500 years, if we go crazy 15, but either way sooner or later we run out, and so on average people will have to live without it. But within a fixed time line isn't it morally superior to share the resource rather than use it up in our own lifetime?

Another argument is that resource usage leads to more sustainable living. The industrialized world has fewer children, and technology increases efficiency, so if consuming nonrenewable resources moves us quicker to a modernized, efficient world we've acted correctly. But it's hard to believe that cars, nitrogen-heavy industrial farming or youtube are having a huge impact on technological efficiency. Indeed, as peak oil threatens to appear that line of thinking suggests we should rapidly push consumption onto the third world to get over this theoretical hump, but that certainly isn't happening.

I think partially, at least in the western world, there's a great deal of technological optimism. We believe that in 300 years people will have solved the problems we're facing today. Our great grandchildren will be flying the void between the stars, living for millenia and enjoying the service of robots. If you believe this, it's less imperative we consider the impact of our actions on future generations, as the assumption is they'll be better off anyways, or that they wouldn't even deign to use as dirty a fuel as oil if it still existed.

I'm not sure. I am optimistic about the future, and the cynic in me believes that we won't move towards a sustainable civilization until easy energy is consumed, so speeding up consumption just brings us closer to whatever future is in store for humanity. But it also seems like technology can be maddeningly elusive. Will we really construct thousands of acres of solar panels in time? What if that turns out to have some hidden flaw, some even more dangerous effect on the environment. America is consuming 20 million barrels of oil a day. If we don't find alternatives, what will it mean when that goes away? I can't even conceptualize what 20 million barrels of oil a day buys you, how we'd handle having to give up all the niceties of civilization.

Ultimately, I find it more plausible to hope for the rapid development of futuristic technology then to believe the planet will voluntarily cut its consumption to a tiny fraction of our current usage. As long as easy energy exists, the desire to consume it and the fear somebody else will if you don't will drive us to use it. I wish I knew how to amend economic theory to properly operate in a world of limited resources, but I've yet to figure it out. On the plus side, we've still got plenty of radioactive elements in the ground to push this question on to future generations.

The Gray Lady Finds A Sickle

2010-02-20T14:37:00.002-05:00

There are legitimate complaints that can be raised against Wal-Mart, but one thing it has consistently succeeded at is offering low prices. What if that changed? What if instead of trying to keep prices low, Wal-Mart decided to aim at keeping profit margins high? Presumably, it would have a few highly profitable years, and then its market share would start to dwindle. Other stores would undercut Wal-Mart and people would start shopping there. But the key is that this isn't instantaneous. It would take accumulating evidence for people to believe Wal-Mart had changed. And it would take a long time for a competing superstore to enter many regions.

This process is sometimes called "harvesting": using the success of a business to create short term gains at long term expense. I first heard the term in this article (strongly recommended), which argues that the high cost of baseball tickets brought lots of money to the teams, but destroyed interest in younger generations. Harvesting is generally viewed as a negative process, a mistake businesses make. But harvesting is starting to look like an important business model online.

Consider Facebook (cash flow positive for the first time just a few months back), Twitter (again, cash flow positive but not profitable yet), Flickr or any other free internet service. They take on debt and investment on the hope of someday finding a way to be profitable. The idea is that charging for Facebook would prevent it from ever catching on, but that once it has caught on you can find ways to monetize it. In Facebook's case, this looks to be true. For Youtube, it's less clear that will happen. Sooner or later the investors into an online business will demand revenue pick up, and at that point the choice becomes harvest or close down. It might kill the business in the long run, but it may be the only way to generate money in certain niches.

The best example I can think of for internet harvesting is "Mommy Bloggers", quite likely the most financially successful portion of the blogosphere. Young, new moms started blogging about their experiences raising a child. Communities of mothers started following them. Recently, sponsors and advertisers got involved, paying these bloggers and sending free products in return for plugs. Some are using this as a profitable addition to their site, but some will push too hard and alienate their readers. As the readers are slowly pushed away, the blogger will be raking in cash. Eventually too many readers leave, and the blog is effectively dead.

Newspapers look to be in harvesting mode now as well. The New York Times is going to start charging for its content online. It's a respected paper, so people will pay. But I suspect it'll do poorly with the younger generations, who don't have the same veneration for the Gray Lady. Behind a paywall it'll bring in money, but not new readers, and when the old readers move on, there will be new news sources that are more generally respected. Perhaps that future news source will also take advantage of its reputation to begin charging. And then over time a new free news leader will emerge.

The key is that online popularity begets popularity. If you hit it big you'll grow and grow, if you don't you'll languish in obscurity. Some fields can grow and profit (Google), but a lot will only profit by shrinking their audience, moving out of the growth region and into decline. It's a weird business model, but it might be the future. In fact, there's a lot to be said for it: the Internet's propensity for change is actually quite endearing. If every decade sees new companies atop each niche, I think we'll see an overall healthier marketplace.

Dress Up, Tea Parties and Semiconductor Device Fabrication

2010-02-13T12:38:00.006-05:00

It's feels like just yesterday our little Teen-Talk Barbie was lamenting "Math class is tough."

But now she's found a job as a Computer Engineer! Good for you, Barbara Millicent Roberts. with a median salary around 100k, the serial job switcher should have plenty of pocket change for trendy new outfits, and whatever surgery gives her her inhuman body proportions. As a computer engineer she'll be working in the boundary between hardware and software, designing computer chips and integrating them with cell phones, industrial machinery, airplanes...really, space is the limit. Some day you may find yourself huddled in your basement, cursing Barbie not for the deleterious affect she had on generations of impressionable young girls but for releasing the Robot Apocalypse on us all. Also announced was News Anchor Barbie, who'll keep you updated on the devastation those cuddly pink robots are loosing on our toppled civilization.

Assuming she focuses on hardware, Barbie will be part of just 11% of females in her field. On the software side, she'd be only slightly better represented, in the 25-30% range. Will she be a role model, stemming the continual decline of those numbers? Or will she get bored, flitting between jobs at an ever increasing rate? She's been a business executive 4 times since the 60's, and women still make up just 15% of Fortune 500 Board Members.

I can believe the big business boardroom is a remaining bastion of sexism, but why the lack of female scientists? Could advanced mathematical thinking really be one of the ways our brains differ? Does society socialize children into adult roles more than we're willing to believe?

I read about a study recently that found elementary school teachers can pass math anxiety on to students of their gender. In an interesting twist, that would suggest that promoting Math and Sciences could actually exacerbate the problem: those with mathematical aptitude would be pushed towards science (more jobs, better pay, social rewards for holding the 'right' job), while people with math anxiety would be more likely to end up as teachers, and pass those fears on to a new generation. It's tough to comment briefly on sociological issues like this, because it's a complex interplay of so many factors that focusing on any small subset is likely to miss the big picture (thanks a lot chaos theory!), but I can believe that promoting teaching and learning as high value pursuits would do more good then promoting science explicitly.

Anyways, congrats to Barbie. If you've ever got any programming questions, feel free to send me an email. And remember: any self-replicating machinery absolutely needs a resilient kill switch.

Let Them Blog Cake!

2010-02-10T19:27:00.003-05:00

I read an article on Fortune today about how tablets will save the publishing industry. I disagree with a lot of what the author wrote, which I think is great. A well thought out piece taking the other side helps me organize my own thoughts on a topic. Maybe I'm just contrary, but seeing the premises and assumptions of the other side lets me better understand the basic premises I'm coming from. A couple lines in particular helped me set down some thoughts that have been bubbling around in my head for a while now.

"The competitor, in this case, is a blogger who will simply read your stuff and repost it in truncated form à la the Huffington Post and so many others. It's a persuasive argument. People definitely want to browse. And using your headline, along with a few key bits of content, is fair use and legal. But many also crave deep reading experiences. Man does not live by blog alone! It would be like surviving entirely on cupcakes."

Blogs are like cupcakes? My experience with the world is apparently a 180 degree flip from his. I view blogs as a chance to get a depth of discussion I've never seen in newspapers or (to a lesser extent) magazines. ScienceBlogs gives me the thoughts of scientists in all sorts of fields. My Heart's In Accra not only teaches me about world events I don't see covered in traditional media, but also gives me the context and history of the news in a way newspapers have consistently failed to. You must hear polling statistics 800 times during an election, but FiveThirtyEight is the only source I've ever found that explains which poll is saying what, why they're saying what they're saying, and where exactly the uncertainties in polling are coming from. Ascii Dreams discusses game design: have you ever run across a game design article anywhere but a blog?

One news source I can't imagine losing is Slashdot. The posts themselves are just pointers to fuller articles, but thousands of comments are posted every day. A community moderation system culls out the noise from the commentary so I can just read the most important messages. No matter what the topic is, somebody out there knows more about it then the author of the original article. Technical infeasibility, similar breakthroughs, all the arguments for or against an idea are brought up. When I run into a news article that doesn't allow comments I feel like I'm missing something now. So many articles are just press releases, or are missing major points, that when I don't get the full range of opinions from other readers I'm unsure of what to believe.

Much of the discussion around newspapers and magazines has been on how they can make money. It's the wrong question. Declining sales are symptomatic: they need to learn why what they were selling isn't interesting to us anymore. It's not just a question of free. If Slashdot went behind a pay wall and lost the thousands of comments, it'd be of no value to me anymore. The question is what can a journalist offer me that an expert in the field can't? Plenty of scientists are perfectly capable of explaining their field in an approachable manner. What insight into Computer Science can a professional journalist offer me that a professor can't? Or that the original scientific articles can't?

Investigative journalism is still a crucial tool in fighting corruption. We need to save that. But the idea that a journalist can best present any information in the world is outdated. The idea that journalists need to play gatekeeper to information is dangerous. More and more of my understanding about the world is coming from bloggers who work in the fields they're speaking about. The biggest threat I see to traditional media isn't copycats undercutting their margins, but millions of experts on small topics sharing what they know and love. Any solution to old media's woes that doesn't address that is a temporary solution at best.

It's A Small World (network) After All

2010-02-08T21:05:00.004-05:00

Certain ideas have a way of showing up wherever you look. The Golden Ratio appears again and again in art and nature. Chaos Theory becomes integral in just about any interesting real world process. It seems like every time I hear about small-world networks, it's in a new context. You've probably heard of it as well, at least in terms of Kevin Bacon.

Small-world ends up being an apt description of this phenomena in two ways. First, any two members of the network are "close", in that just a few connections link them. Hence the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, where in fact 4 degrees are unusually distant (an interesting tidbit from the Wikipedia page: Kevin Bacon doesn't make the top 100 list of most central actors. The top billing shifts as new movies are made, but at the time of this posts is held by Dennis Hopper).

Small-world networks also have "clusters", where individual nodes tend to form groups that are more likely to connect internally than externally. Certain directors regularly use the same actors. An even more clear example is your own social network: you're probably a member of a couple friend groups, where everybody knows everybody else. Hence the entire world is small (compact), but it's also made up of lots of small worlds (clusters).

Why do small world networks matter? We're not exactly sure. There are theories that it's because they're more robust to damage (dropped nodes or edges). Alternatively, it could be that the rules that lead to them (e.g., preferential connection to already large nodes) are common, unrelated to any desirable network property. But although the reason is up for debate, they show up so often something must be up. The interactions between your genes, some ecological systems, brain structure, rock fractures, and social networks are all small world networks. As graph theory spreads through more fields of science I suspect many more examples will be found.

I'm sure I'll post about small networks again, as their tendency to pop up everywhere makes them a good tool for understanding the connections between disparate fields, but I'd like to use them in this post to talk about jobs. I don't have any empirical evidence this is so, but I suspect people's ability to take a job forms a small world network. There are definitely hubs: lots of people are qualified to work at Wal-Mart. There are certainly clusters: Aerospace Engineers could replace each other, but not many other people could. Is the network compact? That's precisely my concern, it appears to be spreading out. If nature finds small world networks to be so important, is that safe?

Let's assume some salesmen know a field really well, and some can just pitch anything. Let's assume the ones who know that field really well could move into some other aspect of it, like management. Let's consider a world where the car industry is declining, and robotics is really catching on. The competition for the sales jobs in the car industry is going to increase, and commissions will be shrinking. Meanwhile, the growing robotics field is likely in need of more workers, so salaries will be comparatively high. Those deeply enmeshed in the automotive world are stuck, but the universal salesmen will move on to greener pastures. As salesmen flow into robotics, the situations are likely to stabilize, and now that the demand is met, salaries will start declining again. Since managing a robotics plant might not be as transferable a skill as sales, that aspect of the field will still be in demand: the sales guys who know robotics well will have the opportunity to move into management. Thus there's a net flow from car sales into robot plant management, even though none of the car salesmen were qualified for that position. A small world network means that indirect actions can still be very powerful. If 10 people needed to each switch jobs to transfer personnel from one field to another, the mechanism would be far too slow and weak to be meaningful.

When everyone was farmers, the only limits for job replacement were geographic in nature. As occupations require greater and greater skill and training, we appear to be breaking into clusters. The highly educated can move within a couple fields, although not universally. Additionally, these fields may be clustered, so aerospace and pharmacology might be high skill but weakly linked. Meanwhile, large portions of the population lack the education for any of these technically challenging fields, and so are stuck in there own cluster. As certain fields declining (see, e.g. Detroit), there isn't the same opportunity to move that labor indirectly to cutting edge fields like nanotechnology: the path from assembly line worker to materials scientist is too long and one directional. You'd expect, then, the very universal hubs of entry level positions would get inundated, as that's the common direction from all the declining industry. The competition between the young and old for jobs suggests that's exactly what's happening right now.

Could the recession be partially our economy diverging from small world principals? It's something I lack evidence for, but that's worth considering. The economy may be becoming resistant to change at the same time the uncertainty about the future is growing. It's an interesting thought as well, because it suggests that this is something we could measure and take specific actions to address. Some fields are inherently high-skill, but some can be achieved by either. Farming is increasingly done by small groups of scientists. They're more likely to be able to switch to other important fields, and farming can clearly be done as a human labor intensive activity, so a transformation towards smaller farms might help keep the system more compact (and farming has arguably held this role since civilization form). It also suggests that opportunities for workers to get new training, and broad, cross-discipline degrees would help. The auto industry probably become a bigger hub as other manufacturing industries closed their doors: if we'd seen that more and more people were concentrating in a single industry we could tried to promote new links between it and other fields, or otherwise prepared for the coming problems. I'm interested to see how network gets applied to this and other problems, as it has the potential to help us understand underlying problems before they surface or at least to connect symptoms to a cause.

The Limits of Knowledge, Part III

2010-02-06T12:29:00.003-05:00

(Continued from parts I and II)

Kurt Gödel (1906-1978)

I left off last time with Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead trying to derive all of mathematics from a small set of logical axioms, preserving consistency and completeness in the process. A consistent mathematical system will always give the same answer to the same question. 1+1 = 3 doesn't occasionally turn out to be true. It's always false. Completeness says that if you can form a valid mathematical statement, you can derive whether it's true or false in your system.

It's easy to see why math being inconsistent would be problematic: You can never be confident about anything again. 1+1 might equal 3. The oven might start shooting out cold air. The Earth could disintegrate at any moment. Who knows? Any argument against even the craziest idea is ultimately based on logic, and that could always change.

An Incomplete Mathematics is less worrisome, but it would upend the scientific and mathematical philosophy of much of history, dating back at least to Greece. We were often seen either as being guided explicitly by divine forces, or as the only logical outcome to a specific setup of the universe. Truth was viewed as a platonic beauty: every statement is true or false. You may not be able to figure it out, but in theory it could be figured out. At the very least God must know the answer. But if all mathematics and logic are incomplete, then there are meaningful, interesting questions without answers. For the divine to be all knowing he'd have to be inconsistent. Which is arguably his prerogative, but it's a very different world. It's not that any path towards truth would be doomed to failure because of your human limitations, any path towards truth would be inherently doomed to failure. No such path could possibly exist. It's a much more pessimistic understanding of the world.

And fittingly, a very pessimistic individual proved that no formal system can be both consistent and complete. It seems common for ideas that upend fields to come from the periphery, from the marginalized groups of scientists. Einstein was unable to find work within the physics community before he revolutionized our understanding of the universe. While Kurt Gödel did his work from within the field of logic, he was inherently an outsider. One of my favorite anecdotes about Gödel revolves around his dislike of human interactions. When someone would try to schedule a meeting with him he would oblige, making explicit plans to meet at a particular location at a particular time and date. Gödel would never show up. When asked why he made all those appointments he had no intention of keeping, Gödel answered that it was the only system he'd found that stopped people from persisting in trying to meet him.

Russel had found a paradox in Frege's attempt to formalize mathematics, so he constructed elaborate rules to keep those paradoxes out. If in doing so he introduced new paradoxes, he'd invent new axioms to hide those. Gödel proved that any attempt to remove paradoxes just added new ones. It's a tricky bit of math, but it comes down to the idea that any interesting formal system can construct a statement along the lines of "this statement is false". Any system that can't make that statement in some form is too restricted to do anything more interesting than addition in. Gödel didn't just prove paradoxes existed in some system, he proved they'll exist in any system. Mathematics is filled with infinities of paradoxes, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Gödel grew less stable as he aged, eventually become extremely paranoid of both germs and poison. He refused to eat anything unless his wife tasted it first. When she was hospitalized for six months and suddenly unable to serve this role, Gödel starved to death. It was an odd end for such a monumental mathematician. Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem is one of those truths so fundamental to the universe, it's unlikely his name will ever be forgotten as long as man exists. It's not the most exciting theorem, but it conclusively set down limits to knowledge, a concept that would be extended with the advent of computers.

Carrots, Sticks, and Carrot Sticks

2010-01-30T18:41:00.002-05:00

I'm always slightly amused by debates about whether to use a reward or a punishment to promote certain behavior. For example, should Massachusetts encourage universal health care by fining people who aren't covered (as they do now), or should they give people who are covered a tax break? Should Jimmy get a trip to Disney if he passes all his classes, or should we cancel the family vacation to Disney if he fails?

I think the second example demonstrates why I find the reward/punishment dichotomy amusing. It's often just semantics. If Jimmy gets passing grades, then he'll end up in Disney. If you don't have health insurance, then you'll shoulder more of the Massachusetts tax burden. Some punishments are clearly punishments (imprisonment), some rewards are clearly rewards (a trophy), but especially when dealing with large groups, you're redistributing some benefit/cost, not explicitly rewarding or punishing.

It seems to come up in taxes a lot. Taxing a segment of the population is unpopular, giving tax cuts to another group are fine. So rather then punish polluting firms, you reward non-polluting firms. Rather then tax increases for the poor, you cut the taxes for the rich and let inflation bring things back to a balance. Amazingly, wording something as a reward or a punishment can make all the difference.

Thus I propose a new term in the vein of "carrot and stick" already used to differentiate between rewards and punishments (as an aside, inaccurately. The term probably comes from tying a carrot to a stick to lead an animal, not beating it while feeding it to a tasty treat). "Carrot" is a reward, "Stick" is a punishment, and "Carrot Stick" is a case where it's both. You can feed a carrot stick to your donkey, or you can hit him with it (possibly ineffectually, but it's a metaphor). What a versatile tool those pre-cut veggies are!

The Limits of Knowledge, Part II

2010-01-24T14:39:00.003-05:00

(continued from Part I)

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

One way of ensuring your name will always be remembered is to have some important scale or number named after you. Slightly less surefire, but still valid, is to make a prediction so fundamentally wrong that people will delight in repeating it generations later. Lord Kelvin passes on both accounts with the Kelvin temperature scale and this (possibly apocryphal) quote: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now; All that remains is more and more precise measurement." Five years later, Einstein would publish his paper on Special Relativity.

I bring this up to point out the scientific and mathematical philosophy of the 19th century. Both were progressing at unprecedented rates, and it seemed possible that man would master all their secrets. With each scientific success, people believed that some fundamental truth was coming closer. Quantum Mechanics deals with a fundamental indeterminacy in the universe (see Schrödinger's Cat), but Newtonian physics is theoretically solvable. If you know the position and velocity of each particle you can predict the future as far forward as you care to. There was a novel philosophy growing that man wasn't a creature of free will, or a Calvinist puppet of the divine, but simply the inevitable progress of a well defined and understandable set of physical laws.

In contrast to the physical sciences, mathematics and logic were in no threat of being exhausted. There is no upper limit to the length of a conjecture, so you can always find a new one to prove. But there was a similar optimism in the field. Even if the statements in math are infinite, it was believed that they ultimately encompassed all possible truths. Any truth could be mathematically proven, any falsehood thoroughly contradicted. And the world of math was seen by its practitioners as one of very clearly defined truths and falsehoods. The everyday world is filled with shades of gray, but math is a Platonic, quasi-religious realm of absolutes. It was even believed that you could build a machine that would take in any mathematical statement and print out a proof of that conjecture's truth or falsehood.

Each field of mathematics derives from its own set of base axioms. You cannot do geometry without definitions about points and lines. Integer arithmetic is very different from arithmetic over real numbers. To many, this was an unsatisfactory state of affairs. They believed since there is only one set of all true statements, they should all derive from the same basic facts. Gottlob Frege, a German mathematician tried to unify math, using set theory as a basic set of axioms to derive the other fields of mathematics. Set theory concerns itself with groupings of objects together. The set of even numbers starts 2,4,6.... The set of nations of the world include Germany, Australia, etc. Frege was able to show that with some basic axioms about sets you can derive geometry, arithmetic, etc.

As his second edition of the book was in the final preparatory stages for publishing, Bertrand Russel sent Frege a letter alerting him to the fact that his axioms allowed in paradoxes. Frege had to add an appendix at the last moment, starting "A scientist can hardly meet with anything more undesirable than to have the foundations give way just as the work is finished..." Frege had begun to put math on a highly formalized setting, but in doing so had created a system with infinite valid statements that could not be proven one way or another. Such a mathematical system would not be a Platonic home of all truths, but one filled with uncertainties.

The paradox comes from the fact that sets can contain themselves. "The set of all non-Empty sets" is itself non-empty, and thus contained by itself. In contrast, the set of nations is not a nation, and so is not contained by itself. Does "the set of all sets not containing themselves contain itself?" If it does, then it must have the property of not containing itself, which is a contradiction. But if it doesn't contain itself then it meets the requirements for the set, and therefore does. Whether you put it in the set or leave it out you get a contradiction. There are a number of less mathematical ways to formulate this problem, such as the following: "There's a barber in a town who shaves all men that do not shave themselves. Who shaves the barber?" It seems like a silly game, building nonsense sentences. It seems odd that something as trivial as question about a barber should shock the foundations of the mathematical world. And yet it did...

Russell was purportedly crushed by his paradox. He had grown up with the quasi-religious view of mathematics as a bastion of truth, and hated to now be associated with an attack on that foundation. But as the good mathematician, he could not deny the mathematical truth that set theory did lead to paradoxes. For many years after he left the field of mathematics, unable to come to terms with the damage he had done to the field. Finally he returned, determined to re-establish the foundations of mathematics. With the help of Alfred Whitehead, Russell wrote a three volume book, "Principia Mathematica" designed to retrace Frege's steps while avoiding the paradoxes Russell had discovered. It was an extremely detailed effort. The book contains the famous remark "From this proposition it will follow, when arithmetical addition has been defined, that 1+1=2."...379 pages in. The book is viewed as one of the most important ever written on mathematics, clearly defining the basic logic that validates it as never before. But did he succeed in clearing the paradoxes out of mathematics? In 1931 the extremely eccentric mathematician Kurt Gödel would prove once and for all that anyone setting out on the endeavor of formalizing mathematics in a way that avoids paradoxes was doomed to failure. And with that, what I would view as the modern age of mathematics would begin.

Could Corporations Use Their New Power For Good?

2010-01-23T12:24:00.002-05:00

Corporations now have free reign in running political advertisements. There are interesting questions about person-hood, constitutional rights, and government rolled up into the issue, but at its simplest this gives corporations more control in government. Was that what's been wrong lately? Has the American citizen grown too powerful, and these poor multinational corporations too weak? If only Haliburton and Blackwater had more access to government would we have been able to avoid the corruption of Iraq War contractors?

What bothers me is the idea that corporations could possibly be responsible partners in shaping government policy. Let's pretend some candidate is running for Senate, and promises that if he's elected he'll eliminate the income tax for programmers. That would be a pretty good deal for me. Perhaps the free market would reduce my salary in return, but it'd reduce the competitiveness of outsourcing firms. I'd just about certainly end up ahead. Would I vote for that guy? No. It would be good for me, but I don't believe government is just for maximizing the money flowing into my wallet. I'm better off financially then most people my age, I feel that I should pay my share.

But what if I was CEO of a public software corporation? Could I say "Sure, it'd help me if I didn't have to pay taxes on my programmers, but that's not a good way to run a country. I'm going to speak out against it?" No, I couldn't. I'd be legally barred from spending corporate money in that fashion. The fiduciary duty of an executive means that he needs to put his shareholders interests first. He's legally liable if he doesn't. It's not some liberal distrust of capitalism that makes me think corporations are going to abuse their new found power, they're legally obligated to do so.

The Preamble of the constitution sets out to "..promote the general welfare." A corporation is legally required to promote the welfare of the shareholders over anyone else. There's a fundamental mismatch here. We could outlaw that clause in corporate charters and require them to be good citizens. But I think it's naive to think that would be any good for the economy. Self interest works well in the free market. But the government isn't, and shouldn't be, the market. The distinction between the two has worked out well for the history of democracy, do we really want to get rid of it? In essence, the court decision has given the loudest megaphone to a small group of people, and told them "if you don't use this selfishly we'll take it away." Could that possibly be good for the nation?

The Limits of Knowledge, Part I

2010-01-12T18:14:00.002-05:00

One of the foundational questions of Computer Science is "what can be computed?" It's a vaguely philosophical question, but it turns out to be approachable from a mathematically rigorous direction as well. I think it's probably the most important thread in modern mathematics (1930's onwards modern...), with interesting implications for the universe and our position there-in (plus the story has a few good characters). And happily, it's one of those mathematical concepts that can be explained without resorting to the use of Greek lettering. It's not the future so much as the recent past, and it's not according to me, just retold, but it's one of those concepts I find interesting enough to want to share with the world again.

So what can be computed? The answer isn't "everything", although that's not immediately obvious. You could build a computer as large as our galaxy, and run it for a trillion years, and there are questions you wouldn't have a definite answer to. Not necessarily even very complex questions. Similiarly, mathematics purports to deal with hard truths and unquestionable proofs, but it turns our not every mathematical question you can think of has an answer you can prove.

But before looking towards the outer reaches, it's useful to look in towards the seeds of mathematics first. A mathematical proof starts with a proposition, then using valid mathematical rules derives that this statement is true or false. The valid mathematical rules are usually just proofs that somebody else already proved true. But those need to follow some set of rules as well. You can build a huge tower of mathematics, but it ultimately needs to rest on something, some ground statement. We call these axioms. Nobody proves axioms. We just say, "yes, that must be true!" and go from there. If A and B are true, then just A is true as well. Why? I don't know. It's what we understand 'and' to mean. It's one of the facts we just start with.

And it's the first limit of our knowledge.

Any mathematical system needs to start with a set of axioms. And because you can't prove these, you don't know for certain they're true. And perhaps more important, you don't know if you missed one. Perhaps there are huge classes of really interesting things you could learn about the universe, if you could just think of this other universal truth.

Or put another way, think of the game children play. "We've got to go." "Why?" "We're late." "Why?" "You took too long getting ready" "Why?" "You were distracted by your toys" "Why?..."

At some point you either need to find your way into a loop, or say "just because". So it is with Math. And so it is with anything. Once we thought the world was made of fire,water,earth and air. Then we broke those down into atoms. Now we think of quarks or strings, but ultimately we're always left with some fundamental bit of reality that's just there. You can reach a bottom, but you've always got to just accept it as true, and accept the fact that their could be another layer you can't see.

Thus as far as physics or religion progress, there's always going to be that nagging question of "is this it? Is there nothing more to reality?" No matter how far our understanding advances, there's always going to be at least one statement we'll just have to take on faith. And if the tower of math and science is on a slightly shaky foundation, the sky above it is just as uncertain. But that's another post...

Partly Wrong is Wrong

2010-01-07T19:37:00.002-05:00

There's an old math game of trying to prove 1=2. As a rule, math games aren't fun. But there's a useful lesson in this one.

a = b
a² = ab
a² - b² = ab-b²
(a-b)(a+b) = b(a-b)
a+b = b
b+b = b
2b = b
2 = 1

Step 5 is dividing each side by (a-b), but it was established that a=b in the first line, so this is a divide by zero, which is not allowed in math. Once you've divided by zero, you can get the numbers to say whatever you want. There are longer examples that try to hide the divide by zero better, but the basic idea in all these is to break a rule discretely.

Card tricks are similiar. Early on you ascertain the identity of the card, by forcing a particular card on the volunteer, or sneaking a peek, or using a plant. Once you know, you can do any audacious thing to seemingly stack the deck against you. The volunteer can shuffle. You can turn your back. Whatever audacious bet you take doesn't matter, because by that point you already know the card.

And if you can do it in math, and in cards, you can do it in conversation. Once you let in a single faulty assumption or implication, you can move very far from the truth. Which isn't to say a single mistake automatically makes you wrong...using divide by zero you generate 1=1 as easily as 1=2. Unlike math, you can also be a little wrong but basically right in an argument. But it's important to remember when evaluating arguments or predictions about the future. A whole long string of reasoning can be airtight, but if there was one hand-waved fact (let's assume X for a second) all the subsequent arguments don't really matter.

Piracy and the Secondary Market

2009-12-28T17:33:00.003-05:00

The idea behind a free market is that each participant fights for their own interests, and a good allocation of resources is discovered. While the battles tend to be minor adjustments in staffing, pricing and offerings, there are occasionally much larger shifts in the battlefront. Major companies go under, industries experience consolidation or pop into existence, and occasionally the rules of the game are changed.

In theory the market should generally be close to an equilibrium state, so there shouldn't be many opportunities to drastically alter the market. But it does happen. A company can make a particularly poor strategic decision. Or technology can change the field of play. And one of the best examples of that effect is the Internet.

While you can find examples all through society, I'm going to focus now on the pivot of piracy. Unauthorized distribution has existed as long as media has, but the Internet makes it easier, cheaper and more private. Yet contrary to claims by the entertainment industry, it isn't clear that its having any negative impact on revenue. The movie industry is having a record breaking year. Software revenue continues to explode. The music industry is the counterpoint, but given its many tactical blunders, its hard to pin the blame on piracy, particularly when the pirates also buy the most music.

Some effort is of course necessary to keep piracy from growing to the point it does harm profits. But given the lack of evidence piracy is doing much damage, why the intense focus on it by the entertainment industries? While you aren't likely to get the average Chinese citizen to spend two months gross income on Photoshop even if you do stamp out piracy, the point is that the battles against piracy are also shifting power away from consumers who do buy your product. Organized media corporations act as middlemen between consumers and artists. While some of that role is important, a lot of industry profit comes from acting as a gatekeeper, controlling what people can purchase. With the Internet replacing traditional gatekeepers, publishers need leverage.

And then there's the secondary market. The first sale doctrine is a legal concept in America that guarantees you the right to sell what you've purchased when you're done with it. Car companies could make a lot more money if you weren't allowed to buy used cars, but the government won't let them enforce such a rule. Free markets are only efficient in theory, but the more participants in a market, the closer that market will tend to be to efficiency. The secondary market is an important way to keep markets sufficiently large. Using the car example again, if you couldn't buy used cars, new cars might cost more, as car makers wouldn't be competing with cheap alternatives.

Most anti-piracy actions also encroach on your first sale rights. If Microsoft catches you pirating software, your XBox loses much of its functionality. This means that buying a used XBox is more risky than it should be: if the old owner was a pirate, you've bought a lemon (thus reducing the value of even legal XBoxes). Similiarly, EA came under fire with the DRM on its hit game Spore: Each key could only be used for a set number of installs, so too many resales(or going through too many computers in the course of your life) would prevent you from accessing the content. On the occasions I do buy a game, I tend to buy something a few years out of date for cheap, rather than a brand new $60 product. Without resales, those cheap old games would no longer be a competitor to the newest lineup.

And really, this is so important to digital industries because bits don't degrade. In fifty years my car will be scrap and my books all yellowed. You expect to pay less at a yard-sale because the products are used, and thus hold a lower value. But if I'm careful, I could sell a song I bought off ITunes in sixty years, and it'll be indistinguishable from a new copy. This is tough competition, and the fairness of it is open to debate. Maybe there do need to be controls on reselling digital media. But that's a harder argument for the entertainment industries to win then the debate over piracy. And returning to the opening concept of market dynamics, I expect there will be more than one signficant shift of power before a new equilibrium between consumers, artists and publishers is found.

What would you rather be doing?

2009-12-06T16:10:00.002-05:00

What would you do if didn't have to work? Survival, whether accomplished by hunting or earning your meal as a stock broker, has always been a major part of the human experience. It may always remain this way, but with continual progress in automation it doesn't have to. When robots farm better than us, hem seams and design airplanes better then us, what will we do with our new leisure time?

It's an important question, because without a good answer society breaks down. Today, "What do you do?" is one of the perennial icebreakers, work a standard conversation gambit. If we lose that, will we lose something crucial to our identities? After endless years of television will we grow sick of our uselessness and reclaim our plows? Or are there other, better goals we could turn our attention towards?

What would you do if the concept of a job faded away? What sort of things do you wish you could accomplish, but lack the time? Add a comment with your thoughts...

What's black and white and read by old people?

2009-11-27T12:00:00.003-05:00

Plenty has been written on the imminent demise of newspapers. Rather than reiterate the basic points, I'll just point you at the two best articles I've read on the topic (props to this blog for originally pointing me to these). If you've got others, post them in the comments, I'd love to read them.

The New Republic has an article explaining the dangers of world without newspapers, specifically arguing that deep investigative journalism is crucial for preventing corruption, but isn't being replaced.

Clay Shriky writes the best general overview of the issue I've read. In particular, he contextualizes with the last big communications shift, the invention of the printing press.

I don't believe its all of for-pay content that's at risk. The latter article in particular is of a quality that could survive behind a pay wall. It's a well-researched, well-written deep examination of a complex issue. Were I to summarize or rewrite the content, something would be lost. It's not just the facts we're looking for in a high quality article, but the way they can provoke our thoughts.

Unfortunately, that's not the norm in newspaper content. Rather, most articles are read for the facts of a current event. We want to know the results on a healthcare reform vote, what outrageous thing Kanye did, who won the game last night. When publishing was expensive, you could derive value from facts. But unfortunately, most facts ultimately hold little value in a rich communication medium.

Once a news source states some fact they've uncovered, the readers can pass the facts along. In the hundreds of thousands of blog filling the internet people are taking in news and spitting it back out, with their own commentary. The abusive case of just reprinting AP articles and putting ads around it is easy enough to deal with. But copyright only applies to the text you write, not the facts in it. One of your readers can rewrite your stories, and then the world will flock to the free source over yours.

The alternative of giving newspapers ownership over the news stories they break is a scary one. Imagine if fox news uncovers a scandal around Obama. Even if we gave them only a day's worth of ownership over presenting the facts of the case, that means that for a full 24 hours the only voice informing the world of what's happening, the only voice setting the tone of the debate going forward, is Fox News. For society to function, everybody needs to be able to discuss what's happening in the world. For that to happen, you can't wall off facts. And if that's true, there's little incentive to pay for facts when you can get them for free immediately afterwards. Of course, that returns us to the core issue of who will discover these facts for us then. It's a tricky issue, but I don't think for-pay news sources are going to remain the solution for long, unless they can start adding something over and above the straight facts.

Did the Uncanny Valley kill the Neanderthal?

2009-11-24T17:58:00.002-05:00

I read an article on Seed Magazine's website today about why the Uncanny Valley exists. The term refers to almost humanlike robots and CGI. When they're very cartoony they're cute, when they're extremely realistic we react to them like other humans, but in between they repulse us. The article explains some theories on what is driving our subconscious to dislike these creations (we think they're dead bodies, we really don't want to mate with them, they confuse our understanding of what man is). I'd like to propose an alternative theory.

Imagine you're a rabbit who has suddenly evolved a poisonous bite. What would you do? You could hunt down all the wolves and dogs in the area, and save rabbit-kind from constant harassment. At first, all the other bunnies would treat you as a savior. Without predators, the bunny society would grow and flourish. And then suddenly, all the plants have been eaten and everybunny starves. If the bunny population doesn't die off, it'll do so by evolving to better regulate their population. And if predators return, then suddenly they won't be able to have babies fast enough.

Part of evolution is adapting to your environment. Part of evolution is being able to adapt when that environment changes. Mammals exist because they could deal with a new threat the dinosaurs couldn't. But part of evolution is avoiding having to adapt to a new environment. If you're well suited for the world around you, its in your best interest not to mess with that world.

Thus even if an herbivore could kill all the predators around it, it probably shouldn't. Similiarly, dogs don't eat plants, but if they kill plants they'll be indirectly killing their food supplies as well. An environment is filled with many niches, and animals who leave other niches alone are generally going to have a better shot at survival.

But leaving other niche's alone says nothing about your own niche. When predators outperform prey, the prey dwindle, the predators starve, and suddenly the prey are safe to grow again. There's a feedback loop that seeks equilibrium. If a new herbivore enters the scene, the situation is different for the rabbits. If they're better at eating the mutual food source, there will be less for the rabbits, and the rabbits will die. If they overeat, the new creatures will die off, but so will the rabbits. Thus competition within a niche will tend to have equilibrium points where one of the two species die off.

If an animal looks very different from you, it probably fills a different niche. If it looks exactly like you, you can mate with it. Even if it outcompetes you, it's got enough genes in common with you that your species is still succeeding evolutionarily. But in between, you've got a competitor. Thus there's incentive to help those like you, ignore those different from you, and kill the middle ground. Humans were not always the only hairless ape. If we're so well equipped for survival that we now occupy every corner of the globe, why didn't any other survive? Some evidence suggests humans may have actively killed off neanderthals, not just by outcompeting it for food but by stabbing it with spears.

Returning to the uncanny valley, this would mean that we're bothered when CGI doesn't quite look human because unconciously we think we're looking at a new creature that could somebody replace us. And interestingly, in evaluating a robot, that's a not altogether irrational opinion to hold.

Imagine you're a lake.

2009-11-17T19:08:00.002-05:00

Imagine a lake. Peaceful, calm, beautiful. There are trees, acting all tall. The sun's shining down. In the distance mountains chill out. Then suddenly, Splash! Something hits the water. Is a child hiding and throwing rocks? Was that a meteor?

Now picture yourself in the ripples that were created. Now picture yourself as those ripples. Imagine that if you zoom in really really close to one little ripple you see a little droplet of water rising out above the rest. That's my analogy for the sun. There's an even smaller droplet of water beside it, and that represents the Earth. And if you zoom in even closer there are a couple molecules of water. Those represent you.

This tiny aquatic world is different then our own, of course. It's two dimensional. The water itself takes up three dimensions, but most of its just solid. The interesting part, the surface between the water and the air, is two dimensional. If you walk far enough in one direction, you really would fall off the water Earth.

Now imagine little water you looking into a little water telescope. You see all the little water stars extending out as far as you can see. And as you watch one, you notice its getting farther away. Intrigued, you look at another star. Its moving away. Another star? Leaving you! Another star? Same deal! Pretty soon, you're positive all the stars are moving away. This ripple is traveling towards the shore, and as it does so, its radius is getting bigger.

So you take out your water calculator and start thinking. You figure out how fast the other water stars are moving away. You figure out how far away they are now. And from that, you realize that all these stars must have been at the same place some long time ago. You do the math and see, wow, that was 34 seconds ago!

Now you've got an idea of when this watery universe started. The very first moments wouldn't be clear: Everything would sort of converge to a ring of a certain size. If you could study the stars enough, you might figure out the contours of that ring. Maybe its smooth with a few ridges, like a baseball. Maybe its more irregular, like a rock. What was it that caused the universe?

Maybe water you would theorize that perhaps there's a third dimension, and something collided with your two dimensional universe. But ultimately, you could never know what that thing was. It's deep under water now. With all the information in the surface of the lake, you'd only be able to construct a 2d cross section of the object. It was three dimensional and left, and you're only 2d. And even if you could guess at the shape of the thing, it wouldn't tell you about what set it in motion. Did it fall of its own volition? Did somebody toss it?

Now stop imagining, and return to our world. What caused the big bang? What existed before it? If there are more dimensions than 3, can we explore them? Will we ever know these answers?

Change

2009-11-14T11:09:00.003-05:00

It's generally misleading to think about things as they are at a single point in time. The defining characteristic of our universe is change. From the laws of physics through the history of man, from cake batter in the oven to religion is there anything that doesn't change?

I think this idea can be particularly important in dealing with people, especially at the level of societies. Anti-racketeering laws intended originally to give the feds a legal weapon against the mafia have since been used to fight illegal immigration. The Expos even tried to use racketeering laws against Major League Baseball. The zeitgeist of a society is important for the people living in it at that moment, but the repercussions can echo deep into the future. The excesses of consumption in the last few generations may become a folk story used to teach children centuries hence.

Thus its important to understand how a society can change. In America, we have well defined rules built into our government for enacting change. Those tools are only available, however, to our legislatures and governors. Society as a whole has blunter tools to enact change in the government, election mostly, but has a great deal of freedom in defining civil society in an ad-hoc and emergent fashion.

Thus each individual has a set of options available to them to enact change, and differing motivations to do so. At one extreme, armed overthrow of the government has always been available as an option, should it grow dangerously oppressive. But such an action would require an extremely motivated core, a generally sympathetic populace, a popular opinion that does not condemn such actions. History has shown a preference for subtler evolution, but not universally.

Which all leads to my main point: changes at one point in time alter the possible changes at a future point in time. Consider Britain, with its increasing levels of surveillance. Detailed understanding of the actions of each individual in a nation can be used to stifle the emergence of dissent. Individuals really only influence the world by influencing enough other people. If a government could identify those seeking to change it, whether by legal or extralegal methods, they could imprison or otherwise isolate those individuals. Change is still universal, and spontaneous uprising is possible, but the growth of government often either directly or as a side effect limits individuals ability to influence the world. If the government at that time is a positive force, and the limitations on influence are presented as limitations on villain's ability to destroy, people can be willing to accept the restrictions.

Change is like a rug that doesn't fit in its room, though. You can push down the power to change the world in one place, and it grows elsewhere. By restricting the ability of the general population to change society, the resistance to changes enacted by the unrestricted party is reduced. And even if the people with all the power are good now, remember the universality of change. Thus, sooner or later, we can expect those with power to use it for their own ends. The less power society has been left with to resist, the more those in power can exploit.

When are the robots coming?

2009-11-07T11:20:00.003-05:00

Where are the robots? I've heard they're more common in Japan, but at least in America you don't see many robots. When a building is going up, I see humans swinging hammers. When a truck's being unloaded, men are carrying the cases. Are we uninterested in replacing workers with more machines? Is the technology not ready yet?

I'm inclined to feel that the latter is a big part of the problem. Vision is a difficult problem. Humans have remarkable dexterity using their hands. And the current generation of robots are extremely specialized. There was a wave of automation in the 80's and 90's on factory floors and warehouses. After installing multi-million dollars, the warehouses found that any minor change in layout of the factory floor could break the system. Businesses unable to change rarely thrive.

In every direction, you see obstacles to successful robots. Vision, speech, planning, object manipulation, adaption: none of these problems have been mastered yet. But despite this, I think we're very close to a robotics boom.

The key is that these problems are being solved in parallel. We don't have perfect image recognition yet, but as we get closer, any robot can benefit. Researchers are closing the gaps on each problem, and in a very short span of time we may go from all these problems being insurmountable to none of them being so. And once the researchers have solved the problems, the engineers and designers will put the pieces together and make the technology accessible; and countless entrepreneurs will start replacing everyone. Expect to start seeing robots frequently by 2020.

The Greek Gods Make More Sense Now

2009-10-11T21:50:00.003-04:00

So, I was just playing scattegories with Caroline when the letter T came up for Greek Gods. Can you think of any??? I bent the category a little bit and wrote Titans, but then wanted to check to make sure they were Gods. I was pretty sure Zeus was related to them, so they'd have to be by family, but I wasn't sure.

Turns out Zeus is the son of Titans, so I count him. Wikipedia also informed me "Their role as Elder Gods was overthrown by a race of younger gods, the Olympians, which effected a mythological paradigm shift that the Greeks may have borrowed from the Ancient Near East." Greek Mythology make so much more sense to me.

The Greek Gods weren't the Gods as we understand them in an eternal, all-powerful being sense. They were child Gods who'd overthrown their parents. Seeing them as teenagers suddenly explained the endless drama and Zeus trying to have sex with everybody. They were just filled with God-hormones.

On a side note, I like the idea that Gods can just be replaced and the laws of space time can be changed. The big bang was just the ending of a phase under a God who really liked compact things.

Solar Panels....IN SPACE

2009-10-06T20:21:00.002-04:00

This blog post is called "The Future According to Paul", so without further ado I present:

Solar Panels...IN SPACE

I believe this is going to be a major source of energy in the future. If you keep an eye on any scientific news source, you'll see the occasional article on the topic: there are companies in America and Japan with contracts to beam energy down from space already. And if this technology sees some success it could help drive down the costs of space travel, making it an increasingly viable option.

The idea is fairly simple: you rocket some solar panels and a microwave generator into space. You aim the microwave at the Earth (think of like a space-based death ray), but instead of reducing the countryside into irradiated wasteland, you catch the microwaves in a receiver, which converts the energy into electricity. And then you turn on a light, or fill up your electric car or something. Hurrah!

Why is beaming microwaves down from space better then catching light here on Earth? First, we've got night and clouds to contend with. A satellite can spend more time in the sun then any point on Earth. Then there's all that atmosphere hugging our planet. If you didn't know, visible light is just a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum. To one side you've got things like X-Rays, to the other you've got radio waves. Weird as it seems, its all the same stuff, the distance between peaks of the waves just differs. For some reason (magic? science?) depending on these distance between the waves, different molecules will either absorb the light or let them pass. If you've got a red shirt, it's because the molecules in it absorb green and blue, and bounce back red. Glass doesn't really absorb any red, green or blue light waves so you can see through it. The atmosphere absorbs a lot of the energy the sun beams down at us. It doesn't absorb microwaves very well though.

So the short of it is that if you take the energy from the sun and turn it into microwaves, you can shoot it through the atmosphere without losing so much of the energy. Hence space based Solar panels. If you can get the panel up into space without using too much energy, you'll get much better results then if you leave the panels on Earth. If we build factories on the moon, we can get the panels into space for even less.

Anyways, you can expect to start purchasing space electricity from your local electric company (you do live in California, right?) as early as 2016. Look for the percentage of space energy to only increase from there.

I Believe in the Universe

2009-09-11T17:58:00.003-04:00

For a long time nothing on Earth believed in God. This is because bacteria aren't capable of holding complex beliefs. But then humans came onto the scene, and the number of assumed Gods made a huge jump. We don't have cultural evidence for pre-civilized man, but the earliest religions we know about tend to be animist. Early man believed something supernatural resided in everything, from cats to thunder. Threads of this belief system persist today, but in general the number has been in decline ever since.

Take ancient Egypt and Greece as examples. In both cases the spirits in individual stones and animals were winnowed down into the major forces. Gods created the world and dealt with the dead. Gods were or navigated the sun. Gods designed animals. Gods put the kick into wine. Things that were overly commonplace, individual blades of grass, lost their mystical nature.

Polytheistic religions are more common today then animist ones, but the dominant belief system is monotheism. In one way, its a move full circle: an omnipresent God is in each blade of grass. But instead of everything having a unique spirit, everything shares one.

The Sun being pulled across the sky in a chariot seems a little silly now. We believe in gravity, and feel it explains the phenomenon much better. But despite a lack of sophistication in the vessel, the Greeks did understand what the sun was. They understood there was relative motion going on between it and us. They understood that it was very hot and that we really didn't want to be any closer or farther away. There were no words in Greek for plasma, nuclear fusion or gravity. Without those concepts, a God made the most sense. In a way, Helios on a chariot was a stand in, a black box to be filled in with better explanations later on.

Thus there's this pattern through history of observing a phenomenon, attributing it to the Gods, and eventually evicting the Gods in preference to science. Demonic possession made way for modern psychology. Bacchus has been reduced to ethanol. As the natural phenomena were demoted from mythology we were left with deeper questions: What created all this? What happens when we die? And these have been wrapped together into a single, almighty power.

I've been struck by all the parallels between the monotheistic (specifically Christian) God and the Universe. God is described as omnipresent, as the universe is by definition. God knows all, and if the Universe is deterministic it holds the keys to all that was and all that has been. We are created out of the cloth of the Universe, and return to it at the end of days (not that we ever really leave it). The scope of the Universe defines the beginning, and ending, of everything. And just as God is described as unknowable, as beyond the possibility of pure comprehension, so appears the Universe. If the speed limit of light holds, then we can only ever see and know a tiny bit of the Universe. It looks to expand far past what we could ever possibly experience, its own rules nullifying the possibility of comprehension.

Thus, I believe God is ultimately our struggles to comprehend the Universe we find ourselves in. And rather than God, I believe in that Universe. I don't think its a poor trade. I believe in a Universe far richer then the one we fathom. My faith tends to the idea that we're a tiny point on a ripple through an unimaginably huge, many-dimensional cloth. I believe that just as our world of ideas and society is uncomprehensible at the level of atoms, we're part of some other structure with its own elegant logic, but which is unlike anything we experience. Looking at the mundaneness of everyday life, I can see where people feel a life without God is lacking a crucical spark. But if we peer past the realm of the everyday, I really believe that the Universe provides all of the mystery, truth and beauty of any God figure.

An afterlife has always struck me as wish fulfilment. The use of God to explain the start of the Universe just pushes the question of original cause back another step. The bible reads much like other mythologies humanity has put aside. As you strip God of human desires and needs, he just seems to blend back into that Universe I believe he represents. This breaking of the dichotomy of Universe and God back into a single concept is where my faith lies.

Asymmetric Narrative

2009-09-07T19:58:00.002-04:00

Engineering computers to perform creative acts is a concepts known as procedural generation. The field is most active in the realm of computer games, but there are also examples in music composition and art. In the video game realm, Spore creates and animates unique creatures based on human input, and Left 4 Dead (a zombie survival game) had an AI director who controlled the pace and difficulty of the game for the players.

This is a topic I'm hugely interested in. The intersection of creativity and computers is a rich and intriguing ones. The strategies for approaching the problem, and the social implications are worthy of many more blog posts. Basically, though, I think the coolest thing about procedural generation is the potential for personalized entertainment. We each have unique preferences in movies. Over time, a procedural generation system could tailor its creations to maximize your enjoyment. Imagine if every movie you watched was well made, if the forms of humor you find cringe-worthy never occurred, if the length was always exactly what you had time for. And in video games, the player is suddenly advanced to the role of an active participant. Instead of following a pre-laid track of levels, you can suddenly make meaningful decisions that completely change the narrative.

The thought that prompted this post, though, is a limitation of procedural generation. I recently caught up on the series Lost. I've noticed that its one of the shows where fans are eager to discuss the events together. We'll compare opinions on plot arcs and deceased characters. We'll speculate on the mysteries of the show and exchange theories. Besides being an entertaining show, its a social experience. The same is true of music, where a commonly liked band can be a bridge into conversation. But if each person were enjoying a personalized story, that sense of belonging with the world would be severed.

Or would it (and here's where the title comes in)? A personalized narrative doesn't need to be independent of other tales. Its not a prerequisite, but imagine if your personal video game has access to your facebook network. Now the same story arc you're experiencing can be shared with your friends. One person might be experiencing it as a tragedy, another as a crime-scene drama. The key is that its still a tale you've both shared. You can discuss the characters and events, even if you've seen it differently. And as a bonus, each tale would necessarily focus on different aspects. By discussing you'd be learning little details that had been hidden from you. Instead of locking us into introverted worlds, procedural generation could encourage us to share our entertainment experiences with friends.

The point, ultimately, is that this would be a different form of narrative then what we've seen. Its interactive, either directly with the software or in the context of our social groups. And I think that's why I'm so enamored with the idea. Its not that regular human created content isn't wonderful, its that with a computer behind the design, you can try things you never could have before. And that's the part of technology I love, the exploratory rush of moving the impossible into the actual.

2009-08-27T21:22:00.002-04:00

It's been a couple weeks since the last post. Vacation happened, and since then its been full steam moving into a new house. There just haven't been enough hours in the day (or previously, enough computers in Northwest Maine) to get a post in edgewise. Caroline's been writing about the trip if you're interested.

Time. There's never enough of it, is there? And even when there has been, I always find a way to procrastinate it away. I've got all sorts of projects I'd love to start: video games and books, robots and companies. But you've got to prioritize, and a paying job and enjoying life keep winning out over hobbies for me.

The future is a lot larger now then it will be when we get there. There's these great big bubbles of potential, both personal and global. From the apocalyptic to the Utopian, from the romantic to the entrepreneurial there are all sort of feasible occurrences. If you believe in free will, any of them might happen. If you believe in the many world's theory of quantum mechanics, they all will. There's this great winnowing process where Paul the scientist comes into existence through the death of Paul the poet and Paul the chef.

I think that's part of the reason the future holds such an allure for me. Before its actualized, its a much broader topic then anything else. You can see these conflicting outcomes: robotic war and global peace, and in a sense they're both valid. Understanding the past is a search for One Truth, but understanding the future requires you to search out all the possible truths. The past is analogous to Newtonian physics, following a prescribed set of rules, and the future quantum physics: these interesting interference patterns of possibility.

The Future According to Paul: it might not come true, but I hope to at least capture a thread fate discarded in stringing out time.

As farming goes, so goes the world

2009-08-08T12:03:00.000-04:00

The bureau of labor statistics says that 0.7% of the population worked in farming/fishing/forestry in 2006. That's already a tiny pecentage, and advances in robotics are likely to drive it even lower. From the same site, construction and extraction employee 5.5%, maintenance and repair 4%, production 7% and transportation 7%. To me, that seems like a pretty exhaustive list of the basic requirements for survival: shelter, food, and even all the mass produced products we fill our homes with, and the time to distribute everything. And don't forget that our houses are bigger then ever, we eat more then ever, and we consume more products then ever. So what if we somehow shared these tasks? What would your day be like?

Monday through Friday, you'd arrive at work at 9. Until 9:03 you'd work in the garden. 9:03 - 9:30 you'd help a neighbor build his house. That done, you'd spend until 10:04 producing goods for your home: chairs, electronics, boots. 10:04 - 10:23 you'd keep the machines giving you this amazing productivity maintained and working, then you'd drive around until 10:47 dropping off the food and products you'd produced earlier. You could now wipe your brow, and call it a day. Less then two hours, and you've produced everything you need.

On the one hand, this is an over simplification: you haven't spent your 2 minutes preaching the word of God, or your 5 minutes teaching elementary school children. At the same time, a slight reduction in consumption and a slight increase in efficiency could account for all the remaining positions.

So it appears we could get by working an hour a day, or one day a week. Technology is driving these requirements down as well: how long before the 24 minutes spent driving around can be taken over by a robot? What do we do with the other 4 days of work we do? And why can so few people spend their days writing music or painting art?

We have a day's worth of really critical work each, and its falling. Its like musical chairs: everyone's trying to find their full employment, but there's just not enough. So we've got a massive legal system, and billions spent on advertising, convincing people they want more then they need. Why? What if employment was optional? Give rewards to those who do it anyways, especially those who do jobs that nobody else wants to or can. Sure, people would choose not to work who otherwise would, but couldn't we muster a couple hours a day? What would life be like then?

Who owns what

2009-08-06T18:30:00.000-04:00

There's an interesting debate occurring around the concept of imaginary property. Physical goods lend themselves to an easy understanding of ownership, primarily because transferring an object from one person to another necessitates the first person losing possession of it. With media, however, that situation changes.

Emailing you a song in no way degrades my own copy. Similarly, ITunes can sell thousands of copies of a song with essentially no marginal costs. Is the song still property? Companies think so, and consumers seem to as well, albeit in different guises. The entertainment industry wants to be able to restrict you from redistributing the content they've “licensed” you. The consumers are a less homogeneous group, but there does seem to be a desire to be able to keep a product they've paid for, and sell it when they're done.

As a society we're riding out the inherent discrepancy between what technology allows and what a seller wants. Reselling a traditional product undercuts the original producer, but marginally, as each consumer can only perform the act once per product. Even if a company wants to stop resales, there's a pragmatic difficulty to it: they aren't involved in that transaction. Traditional crimes, like theft, murder and rape, have a victim actively involved in the crime. Copyright infringment is like anti-sodomy and drug laws, in that a third-party demands a transaction between two other people stop.

I've noticed in articles pointing out a problem with DRM (technology that prevents you from using electronic products in a way the producer doesn't like) a lot of musicians have started positing comments. They'll argue that this is their job, and that they need DRM so people will buy their product.The example that sparked this post included the comment that I was a stranger, so he didn't trust me, so that's why he needed to put DRM around music he produced.

I realized that that was fair, but that I didn't trust him either. And its not him, specifically, its the record company who's representing him. Microsoft and Walmart (among others) have both sold people music and promptly decided they didn't want to support the servers necessary to ever change computers or upgrade your OS without losing every song you bought. Amazon's Kindle had the technology to read aloud to the blind which an Author's group made them disable. Amazon retains the rights to delete books you've purchased through them. And if you fall outside of the rules on content you could face a $1.92 million fine or potentially 10 years in prision.

Those are really just a small sample of cases where DRM or the DMCA have been used to cause real harm. Shady companies, generally large ones, have been using them as tools to harm consumers. There's finally some degree of consumer backlash brewing, and it will probably harm independent musicians who just want to make a sale. But unfortunately, the alternative of accepting a contract where the product I just purchased can be taken away tomorrow is just poor business sense on my part. I refuse to buy any products a company can remotely disable. If a company would just guarantee lifelong access and access to a secondary market, I would be happy to embrace that DRM, and we could move forward against piracy. But as far as can tell, that's not what the entertainment industry wants.

Introductions All Around

2009-08-04T18:22:00.000-04:00

Welcome one and all! This is “The Future according to Paul”, my first ever blog. I'm excited to finally be starting one. Growing up in the 21^st century, particularly being involved with computers as a major, I've watched the blogosphere grow from a quirky niche in a nascent technology to a whole new form of media. At its onset I never believed I'd contribute to a blog: what did the world care about what I have to say? Popular perception in the early days of blogging was a bit like the current perception of twitter: that it's just a growing mass of the meaningless minutiae of other people's lives.

What's changed? Partially, I'm a slightly more confident individual then my pubescent self. My sphere of interests has expanded past the myopia of middle school to topics generally interesting. I've also started to appreciate the archival nature of the Internet. It's young and exciting, so we lose track of the novelty that easy storage of our thoughts presents. Being able to look back at my thoughts forty years in the future, organized by topic, seems if not valuable at least interesting. Thus was born a new blog into this global web.

With the barrage of text the Internet uses to overwhelm our attention, I thought it important to label this latest volley with the topics I expect to be discussing. As the title suggests, my interests point forward in time. My cares about popular culture is already starting to atrophy. I don't go on adventures, or work in a public facing position I can accumulate anecdotes from. Rather, my thoughts tend to dwell on some slightly obtuse topics: quantum physics and procedurally generated content, the social impact of cheap recording devices and the necessities of work in an automated age. In short, the future. I hope you'll enjoy what I've got to say, and that you'll share your own insights here.