Category: Technology

Posted on

Why the Suit?

This week’s notes:

There it is again– a man wearing a dark pants and a matching jacket and a light shirt with a dark cloth tied tightly around his neck. A man in a suit. What is a suit? Why do powerful men all around the world wear one? Why, for heaven’s sake, do Japanese businessmen wear suits? Why did Malcolm X?

There has been a bit of noise this week about the IBM computer that supposedly defeated some of the top human Jeopardy Contestants. I have rarely heard such unmitigated bullshit in the past few years.

Consider this:

The computer was allowed to store the IMDB and several encyclopedias including Wiki on it’s hard drives. The human was not even allowed to use Google.

The computer did not express the slightest desire to play the game or win. The IBM programmers did. They cheated by having the IMDB and Wiki with them when they played while the human contestants, of course, did not even have a dictionary.

Some of the observers were dazzled that the computer was able to understand a rhyming word– what animal living in a mountainous region rhymes with “Obama”. They were surprised that the computer had been programmed to “know” that llama rhymes with Obama? You are indeed easily impressed.

Posted on

Robot Love

More on Robot Love

Am I right? Consider this: would you enjoy watching a TV show in which contestants competed to solve complicated math equations as quickly as possible? Now, would you be excited to see a computer compete against the humans in this contest? I didn’t think so.

Yes, computers can crunch numbers. In fact, in essence, that’s all they do. The natural language used for the questions in Jeopardy are broken down by the computer into bits and bytes and then processed. Very quickly.

From the computer’s point of view, all of the questions are nothing more than math equations to be solved with speed.

It’s a Binary World
Now this one really bugs me: “KG Blankinship” writes in a letter to the New York Times that “of course we can build machines that exhibit purely random behavior by exploiting quantum mechanics as well”.

But before that he says something even more absurd: “Self-awareness and the ability to adapt creatively can also be programmed into a computer”. The statement is self-contradictory but he hits on a truth: “can be programmed” into a computer. Next, he’ll tell us that a computer can program itself. As if the program that told it to program itself could ever be something that was not, no matter how many steps down the chain, the product of human intervention.

Can a computer’s behavior ever be truly “random”? Or is the appearance of randomness merely the irreducible fact that the human’s have hidden the schedule for the behavior from humans by employing elaborate and obtuse mathematical formulae? Yes, always. And it’s always ultimately math. And the computer is always ultimately binary, which means it can never not be math. And if someone jumps up and shouts “yeah, but sooner or later they will find a way to integrate organic cells…” I say that on that day the organic cells will be self-aware or random, not the computer.

Why does it matter? Because sooner or later someone is going to tell someone else that something is true or must be done and can’t be contradicted because a computer said it was true or must be done. No, the programmer said it was true or must be done. The computer is only doing what it can only do: parrot the input of it’s master.

It occurs to me that some of the people defending the idea that computers can “think” like humans operate under the assumption that the human brain is binary in function, that is, that neurons are all either on or off, with no meaningful in-between state. (I suppose you could also argue that a very, very large number of computer chips could attain a level of virtual analog operation, where there are so many simulated “in-between” states that is operates like a human brain.)

It’s an intriguing line of thought. I don’t believe the human brain is binary in that sense. I believe that human beings are an integrated system in which any particular state of virtually any part of the body has an infinite range of values, which, combined with every other part of the body having an infinite range of values, produces an organism that can never be matched by any device that is, by definition, at its fundamental level, always binary.

To believe that human brains are also binary is to impose a reductionist view of biology onto an organism.  You can only believe it if you choose to see only the binary functions of the organism, and ignoring the organic non-binary aspects of the brain.

Posted on

After the Performance: AI

There has been a bit of noise this week about the IBM computer that supposedly defeated some of the top human Jeopardy Contestants. I have rarely heard such unmitigated bullshit in the past few years. Consider this:

The computer was allowed to store the IMDB and several encyclopedias including Wiki on it’s hard drives. The human was not even allowed to use Google.

The computer did not express the slightest desire to play the game or win. The IBM programmers did. They cheated by having the IMDB and Wiki with them when they played while the human contestants, of course, did not even have a dictionary.

Some of the observers were dazzled that the computer was able to understand a rhyming word– what animal living in a mountainous region rhymes with “Obama”? They were surprised that the computer had been programmed to “know” that llama rhymes with Obama? You are indeed easily impressed.

The odd thing is that the computer’s performance hasn’t even been all that impressive, even if it was actually a “performance” in any human sense of the word. Apparently, it is offered the question in text rather than verbally. 25 IBM programmers in four years couldn’t do better than that? And why does it get a bye on the verbal questions? Human contestants can’t ask for a print out of the question before they offered verbally to other contestants.

This is a scam.

The bottom line, of course, is that computers can’t “think”. They will never think. All they can do is process data. The data and the processing are constructed by humans. The computer contributes nothing but the illusion of autonomous operation.

People who think computers think are staring at the puppets at a puppet show and wondering what they do at night after the performance.

Posted on

The Orwellian Camera

On one of the new Sony digital cameras, you can choose a setting that will prevent the camera from taking a picture unless it detects a smile on the face of your subject.

We have reached the ultimate of the nanny corporation: telling you when to take a picture, when someone’s face is worth of immortalization, when you will be suitably charmed by the results.

As cameras get better and better at basic tasks, it becomes more and more difficult for professional photographers to distinguish themselves from a reasonably astute– and cheap– amateur.  In the world of art, this incubated the developments of expressionism, cubism, and abstract art.  If anyone (with a camera) could create a reasonably accurate image of a face, then what makes a work of art “valuable”?  Something you can’t do with a camera: expressionism.

Posted on

The Cost of Death

From the Washington Post, June 11, 2009

In the final two years of a patient’s life, for example, they found that Medicare spent an average of $46,412 per beneficiary nationwide, with the typical patient spending 19.6 days in the hospital, including 5.1 in the intensive-care unit. Green Bay patients cost $33,334 with 14.1 days in the hospital and just 2.1 days in the ICU, while in Miami and Los Angeles, the average cost of care exceeded $71,000, and total hospitalization was about 28 days with 12 in the ICU.

Some differences can be explained by big-city prices, acknowledged Elliott Fisher, principal investigator for the Dartmouth Atlas Project, “but the differences that are really important are due to the differences in utilization rates.”

Much of the evidence suggests that the more doctors, more drugs, more tests and more therapies given to patients, the worse they fare — and the unhappier they become, said Donald Berwick, president of the independent research group Institute of Quality Improvement.

The kicker here is that there is evidence that the more treatment a patient receives late in life, the less happy he or she is.

I believe it. Anyone who has spent time in a hospital or nursing home can’t help but believe it.

Billions of dollars of health care spending in the United States is guided by a very simple and pernicious logic: don’t you love your mother? (Or father, or grandparent, or…). And if you love your mother, don’t you want to do everything possible to extend her life? Everything? Even if the odds of the treatment actually extending her life or improving her quality of life are not very good?

I’m sure some elderly people simply want to live for as long as they possibly can even if it bankrupts their families, but I don’t believe most of them want that. I think most people in their 70’s and 80’s accept that life comes to an end eventually and probably hope, more fervently than for anything else, to die in peace, close to friends and family, and without unbearable pain. They don’t want to spend their last weeks or months strapped to a bed with tubes going in and out of every orifice, nauseous, drugged out. And they don’t want pallid substitutes for pain killers because the pharmaceutical industry has succeeded in establishing a monopoly over drugs.

The average American works hard all of his life, buys a house, builds up his assets, sends his children to college, saves something for retirement, spoils the grand kids, and then, just when he thinks he’s survived the economic snake-pit of American capitalism, the health care system sinks its fangs into him and sucks him dry. If you want to leave something for your grandchildren, you need to drive your car off a bridge before you become incapacitated.

Perhaps one of the most depressing facts of American life is that the medical-industrial complex has managed to convince many Americans– and almost all talk radio hosts– that the cruelest, least fair, and least efficient health-care system in the Western World is actually the best. They stand there bankrupted and ruined, dropped by their insurance companies, buried under piles of arcane incomprehensible forms, denied critical treatments because their insurance companies simply refuse to pay out… and they look at us Canadians and go, “Oh my god! You have to wait three weeks for an MRI?”

Posted on

The Ungrateful Passengers of Flight 1549

Passengers who have received some of their luggage say they are grateful, but not all of them are ready to absolve US Airways of responsibility for injuries, emotional distress and losses they claim to have suffered.

The airline’s insurance company, A.I.G. Aviation Adjustment Services, has started offering each of the passengers $10,000 in exchange for agreeing not to sue the airline, some passengers said. Ms. Lightner, who lives in Tega Cay, S.C., said she had received a two-page contract from the insurer but had not decided whether to sign it.

NY Times, May 18, 2009

Everybody has heard how the heroic captain, Chelsey Sullenberger, landed his crippled Airbus A320 safely into the Hudson River, January 15 this year. The Airbus320 struck some large birds– Canada geese– as it was taking off from LaGuardia Airport, New York City. The geese were sucked into both engines causing catastrophic failure. The jet was not high enough to glide for any distance and, after a brief, hair-raising exchange with the LaGuardia air controllers, Sullenberger safely glided the A320 to a landing in the Hudson River. All passengers and crews were rescued by ferry boats and other craft that reached the plane within four minutes.

Nobody is suing the geese.

The passengers have been offered $10,000 by the airlines. For what? I don’t know. It sounds to me very much like an accident. Usually, passengers sue an airline if a plane crashes due to some incompetence or negligence. On the surface, it appears, to the contrary, that the cause of the crash was an unavoidable accident, that the crash was not caused by any deficiency in the Airbus 320, and that the crew of Flight 1549 performed extremely well. Who do you sue?

Well, if you’re a lawyer, I imagine you could make the case that the airline should be responsible for the general existence of risks and accidents.

It doesn’t seem to matter nowadays. For one thing, lawyers seem to believe that every lawsuit, no matter how frivolous, should be negotiated and settled with an undisclosed amount of cash and a confidentiality agreement. This is usually cheaper than going to court. The lawyers suing on behalf of the passengers know this and hope to score a big fat settlement quickly and bloodlessly, because the negotiators for the airlines are other lawyers.

Could it be that there is no negligence, no fault of the airlines.  Just a bunch of lawyers arranging a deal together that benefits them more than anyone else.

The Ditch Switch

“The Flight crew did not activate the “ditch switch” during the landing.” Wikipedia

The function of the ditch switch is to close all external outlets and openings in the event of a crash landing on water, to prevent the aircraft from sinking too quickly. In all the coverage of the event immediately afterwards, I never heard this mentioned even once. For all the accolades Sullenberger received, he apparently forgot to do something important: hit the ditch switch. Had there been loss of life, because the aircraft sank quickly after ditching, and had the cargo doors not been ripped open anyway, this fact would probably have been pivotal to our assessment of Captain Sullenberger’s performance.

It wasn’t his only mistake: he initially gave Air Traffic Control the incorrect flight number. None of this alters the fact that Sullenberger performed extremely well doing the one thing he is really paid to do: land the plane safely.

June 15: I just saw a documentary on Flight 1549 which noted the issue of the “ditch switch” and claimed that the air plane was sinking quickly at least partly because of that mistake.

I have not read anywhere that anyone thinks the crew of Flight 1549 should have been able to avoid the flock of Canadian Geese. Can they do that? Do they watch for flocks of geese, from the air traffic control tower for this reason?

I do know that they do take some measures to discourage birds from hanging around near the runways. Would that be the basis of a lawsuit? They didn’t do enough to stop the geese from flying into the path of an airliner?

Posted on

Intel’s Ingenious Actors

“The real inventors are not in the ads; they are played by actors. Mr. Bell said he wanted to ensure the commercials were humorous, and avoid arguments with Intel employees over which should be featured.” NY Times, May 6, 2009, on Intel’s newest ad campaign.

It tells you a lot about Intel that when they decided to run a bunch of ads that supposedly showcase how their own engineers and technicians are on par with rock stars and artisans, it couldn’t stand to show real employees. So they hired actors to play Intel’s real employees.

This is about as cynical as you can get.  The whole point of the ad should be that the people in it are authentic.  They are counting on audiences to be stupid.  They are probably not wrong.

One of them is tagged as co-inventor of USB. It tells you a lot about consumer ignorance that most people will regard that as a heroic achievement. USB is a cooperative venture between Microsoft and Intel intended to dodge the cost of adding a 1392 (“Firewire”) port invented by Apple. Firewire has been around for years and years before USB, and it is still faster and more reliable and doesn’t screw up your computer when you plug in or unplug devices. (I am copying large number of very large files right now to a USB device and, as I watch them slowly crawl across the ports, I crave a Firewire connection instead.)

Why on earth did they not use Intel’s real engineers? Because they have no regard for honesty and authenticity whatsoever. None. Not an ounce of respect for truth or accuracy or integrity. None. None whatsoever. Nil. Zero. They didn’t hesitate: let’s tell people about our company. Let’s lie.

Surely the advertising agency will defend itself by saying that advertisers use models all the time. That’s true– and the public knows that ads that feature unrealistically beautiful people in it posing beside cars or swimming pools drinking beer are using models and actors. But the Intel ads deliberately adopt the style normally used (by Home Hardware, for example) to show real employees in order to intentionally confuse the viewer into thinking these are real Intel employees. They even tag the “actor” with the real name of the engineer without identifying him as an actor.

And I know that nobody else cares. And I know that nobody cares that I care. But this is my web page and I get to say what I like.

Posted on

Robots Can’t Love

I enjoyed “Wall-E”, because the graphics were nice, and the action was wittily contrived. Wall-E meets and falls in love with a more up-to-date computer that looks like an inflated iPod. The two coo for each other.

But why do people so readily want to believe that robots might some day be capable of having feelings?

This is an immutable and irrevocable fact about robots: robots are programs– there is not a single thing they will ever do that is not the result of a programming instruction placed there by a human technician. The “feelings” expressed by a robot will always and ever be as real to anyone as the cuckoo in a cuckoo clock, or those dolls that used to have a string in the back, and will probably be twice as annoying after the very, very brief phase of novelty wears off.

Well, there are movies about talking dogs and flying men and 12-year-olds who know Unix (Jurassic Park), so what’s the problem? The problem is, I get why we might have a compelling movie about a talking dog, or a smart 12-year-old, or a man with superpowers: all of them correspond to real beings who have real feelings, and there are explanations for the dog, the 12-year-old, and superman. There is no explanation than can possibly explain why a robot would have human feelings, just as there is no possible explanation of why a bullet might fly at 10 miles per hour, or there would be a parking spot available right in front of that downtown office building our hero needs to enter immediately.

The problem is, I just don’t find a story line about a robot with feelings compelling. It’s just not interesting. It’s impossible to care about the robot with feelings because I can’t escape the awareness of the fact that every action the robot takes in response to his “feelings” is, in fact, the result of a program created by his manufacturer.

Ironically, the most interesting idea about a robot with “feelings” is this: what if the humans in the story didn’t know it was a robot?

What about “Blade Runner”?

All right– this is an interesting movie. But the “replicants” are clearly not robots– they’re genetically engineered organisms. Or are they? The movie doesn’t explain. They bleed and they die and they have feelings. Does that answer the question? Yes it does– they are organisms, genetically engineered to function like humans, so they can work and live where humans would find conditions intolerable.

But… in one scene, Deckard encounters a maker of the eyes which are clearly manufactured, aren’t they? In fact, they could just as likely have been cultured in some way, grown from stem cells, or what have you.

The most beautiful moment in the movie comes when a replicant does something absolutely human– gets nostalgic:

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near Tanhauser Gate.

…All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

Other concepts that a Hollywood Producer found credible:

  • perky brain surgeons who look and talk like Meg Ryan
  • parking spaces in front of the building you suddenly need to enter very quickly in order to save someone’s life
  • soldiers as heroes who never seem to actually kill anybody
  • mothers who have all the time in the world to send their children off to school with hugs and kisses and expressions of consuming devotion– as if they knew something bad was going to happen
  • annoying mentally disturbed men who seem strangely attractive to young, beautiful women
  • rogue police who “break all the rules”
  • suspects who immediately tell the truth when threatened by the rogue cop who breaks all the rules.
Posted on

Reel to Real: The Aiwa TP-40

Somewhere around 1966, my brother Harry gave me a tape recorder exactly like this one.

 

I loved this tape recorder, the Aiwa TP-40.  (Amazingly, someone posted a video of the unit in its original packaging!)  It was my first real electronic device. It had a microphone and an ear plug and a built-in speaker. I actually used it to record music from the radio. If you didn’t have the record back then, that was the only way you could hear a song over again when you wanted to, short of buying the record.

So this was the tool of my first act of musical piracy.

I’ve always liked the looks of the reels turning around. I’ve even toyed with the idea of picking up a used Nagra recorder for the pure visceral thrill of seeing a finely crafted machine actually do something, visibly. The television show “Mission Impossible” used to use a Nagra for the famous “your mission, should you decide to accept it…” sequences at the beginning of each show. It was cool.

The Nagras, however, are such marvels of engineering that even though they are completely obsolete they still command very high prices on eBay. I saw one for over $1000. That makes no sense– you can buy a very, very good digital recorder for $150.

I have a little minidisc recorder which, compared to my little Aiwa, is a Boeing 747 compared to a Spitfire.

Posted on

The Spammer Lobby

It is a scandal beyond all comprehension that the government continues to allow spammers to operate with virtual impunity.

Do you wonder why you never read about a spammer being caught and sent to jail? Because just when the U.S. government was about to pass serious legislation (which still was not enough) to restrict the activities of spammers, it chickened out, took money from the spammers for their election campaigns, and castrated the legislation.